Help With EWS and Students E-mail
All College of Engineering Students will receive a permanent account which will remain active throughout their enrollment in the University and will be valid on all EWS workstations. All students in the college will have received notification of their account during the summer, prior to their first semester at the university. The logins and passwords have been randomly generated. It is strongly suggested that you change your password upon returning to campus. Those students not receiving a letter informing them of the account or who have lost the information can go to any of the workstation lab locations, where a consultant on duty will assist users with any account/login inquiries.
Electronic mail can be an integral communications tool between users of networked computers. E-mail can be sent to
users on your system or to
nearly any other networked machine on campus, or anyone with an email account around the world. E-mail is also an excellent way to communicate with your professor
right here on campus.
Your home directory should contain a mailbox file (mbox) that stores messages received by you. When you login, the system will notify you if you have new mail.
The mail will be in the mail spooler, the file .INBOX in your home directory, which serves as the mail system post office. Mail is stored here until you
read it and either save it in your mbox or delete it. You should read your mail often and discard unneeded mail to save space on your home directory.
To check your email type pine at any command prompt. The computer will respond with a
menu screen like this:
If you want to view your messages in your INBOX, the "post office" where you receive your new mail, type the letter i or use the arrow keys to highlight "Folder
Index" and press return to view the messages in the current folder, the INBOX. You should see an index of all the email you have received since your account was
created.
When you get to the screen displaying your messages found in INBOX, there may be several lines of information. Each line of information is an email message. The first letter in each line tells you the status of the message. N means the message has not
been read yet, A means the message has been responded to, and D means the message will be deleted the next time you quit pine. After the letter, there is a date listed to tell you when the message was mailed. The next column gives a name for th person who
sent you the message. After that is a number in parentheses which gives you the length of the message in "bytes"(character letters). The last column of the listing gives the subject of the message(worker help).
To read a message, use the arrow keys to highlight the message you want to read and press return.
You will see a screen like the following:
The message will show the date the message was received, who it was from, and who the message was mailed to (messages can be mailed to more than one person at
a time). The subject of the message is also listed. Underneath this group of information is the body of the message.
At the bottom of the screen is a listing of options you can do with the message. To get more help, type the question mark (?) key.
Other mail commands
- ? Lists a brief summary of commands
- m Returns to the main menu
- d Marks the message deleted, message will be deleted when you exit pine
- r Replies to the sender, and gives the option of replying to the other recipients of the message
- f Forwards the message to another user
- u Marks the message undeleted(if previously marked deleted) so the message will not be deleted when pine exits.
- o Gives a list of other commands that can be used, such as save or export
- q Exit pine
To send mail to another person, you will need to know their email address.
Start off in the pine main menu. Press the "c" key to compose a message, or move the
hi-lighted bar with the arrow keys until you have compose message hi-lighted, and press enter.
The screen will look like this:
- The cursor will appear right after the colon after the "To" field. Enter the person's email address on this line. It should be of the form user@domain (ex:students.uiuc.edu); the entire address needs to be typed in or the person will not
receive the message. Press enter after typing the full email address.
- The cursor will now be on the next field, the cc, or carbon-copy field. This optional field allows you to send the same message to more than one person's mail address. If you want to add more than one other person to mail, then separate each ad
dress by a comma.
- The next field is the Attachment field. This optional field is used if you want to send someone a text file located on your system. For example, you could attach a copy of your resume to the mail message.
- The final field is the subject of the message. This tells the receiver of the message what the message is about. This field is also optional, but it is suggested that you use it.
- After that you can enter in your message test. Pine uses "auto-wrap" just like most common word processing programs which allows you to type paragraphs without hitting return after the end of the line. You can also go back and correct mi
stakes within the text using the arrow keys.
- Sign your message with your name, so people know who they are receiving mail from.
If you have accounts on multiple systems, you may wish to have all the mail you receive on each account forwarded to one system, so that you can read all your mail at once. This is done by creating a .forward file in your home directory. To do t
his, create a .forward file (using the pico editor or some other text editor) which contains a user login name and the name of the domain to forward to. For example, if user s-neeze has an account on students (students.uiuc.edu) and she wants all of her EWS mail forwarded to her students account, her .forward file on the Engineering Workstations would contain the following line:
s-neeze@students.uiuc.edu
All workstations also have a mail handler called elm. It is a similar email program that has more functionality than pine, but is a little harder to learn. To invoke elm, type: elm. For more information about this handler,consult t
he man pages by typing: man elm.
Popping mail off of EWS with Netscape
You can also "pop" your email off of the EWS system using netscape from any machine on campus. Under the pulldown window heading "Window", choose "Netscape Mail" and another window will appear.
If you are not on an EWS machine, you will need to first set the name of the server netscape uses to find your mail. Under the pulldown window heading "Options", choose "Mail and News Preferences". A window will appear. Under the Outgoing Mail section
, on the SMTP Server line, edit the box so it says "ews.uiuc.edu" (without the quotes). Under Incoming Mail, select the POP3 radio button. Then set the Server to ews.uiuc.edu, and set the User Name to your netid. Then click the OK button.
If you are on an EWS machine, or are not and have completed the above paragraph, then click the "Get Mail" button on the far left side of the button bar. A popup window asking for your password will appear. Type in your EWS password and your mail will
be retreived off of the ews machines. The message subjects will appear in the upper right window and the body of the message will appear in the lower window.
If you need more help, click the help pulldown menu on any netscape window for additional information.
From the menu provided, the user will choose an option. Inorder to read mail or compose mail you should follow the same procedures as you would if you were in your EWS mail.