What You Need in Order to Use Remote E-Mail

What You Need in Order to Use Remote E-Mail

Nowadays, your e-mail is usually received and stored by another computer, for you to download at your leisure. We look at a few of the mail programs that support remote e-mail later in this chapter. Most mail programs are graphical clients, meaning you can’t use them from within a terminal window. If you really need to fetch remote mail and read it in a terminal window, the program you’ll probably end up using is fetchmail, which takes remote mail and puts it into a local mailbox.

Some common ground does exist among remote e-mail programs. They don’t actually send and receive your mail, so they need to be told where your mailbox is. To configure your e-mail program, you need an inbound mail server and an outbound mail server.

A machine is somewhere out there with your mail on it. Because mail comes into that machine for you, it’s called an inbound mail server. When you configure a mail client to talk to the mail server and get your mail, the mail client configuration probably talks about incoming mail. Most likely, you get your mail via Post Office Protocol (POP). This is also called an incoming mail server, or a POP server.

If you want a good snail mail analogy, think of this as like the mailbox where letters to you are dropped off. (To continue the analogy, the spam messages you invariably get are sort of like bills, only they’re not bills for anything you actually bought.)

You have an account on an inbound mail server with a username and password, which is used to keep anyone else from reading your mail and you from reading anyone else’s mail. Most often, the username is your username — the thing that goes on the left side of the @ in your e-mail address. To set up an inbound mail server, you need this name and password.

When you want to send mail out, you need to use another mail server. Sometimes, the inbound and outbound mail servers are the same; sometimes, they’re different. It doesn’t matter! You just go into your mail program’s setup (we show you how later in this chapter for some of the common ones) and select an outbound mail server. The most common way to do this is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). This can also be called an SMTP server.

Mail hound

Another UNIX mail program worth mentioning is the humbly named mutt. Michael Elkins, a physics undergrad at California’s Harvey Mudd College, wrote the original version of mutt in 1995 when he finally got fed up with the limitations of elm. (mutt’s motto for the ages: "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.")

Although written from scratch, mutt was originally based on elm, with various ideas from Pine and other UNIX mail clients thrown in to create a unique hybrid, or mongrel — in short, a mutt. (And you thought that mutt was an ultra-nerdy acronym for Mail User Transaction Terminal, didn’t you?) Unlike elm, which is a basic text-based, one-message-at-a-time affair, mutt can handle colors (fancy that!) and message threads. Threads group messages based on their subjects so that you can tell which messages are responses to which. Threading is particularly useful if you carry on lengthy e-mail conversations with a number of different correspondents or if you subscribe to especially active mailing lists.

All in all, this mutt can hunt. It lets you attach files to e-mail messages by using MIME. It supports PGP (pretty good privacy) encoding for keeping your love letters secret. It automatically opens a Web page in your browser when you click a URL in a mail message (if you don’t know what that means, try Chapter 19). It has tons of options. It’s small. And in the best UNIX tradition, it’s free.

You can download mutt from FTP sites all over the Internet, including the FTP archive at the computer science department of Michael Elkins’ alma mater (it’s at ftp://ftp.cs.hmc.edu/pub/me). It also comes along with various versions of Linux, such as Red Hat Linux and Caldera OpenLinux.

In our snail-mail analogy, this machine is like a street corner mailbox; you go to it and drop the mail off.

�Tip�� Netiquette

E-mail has been around long enough for an etiquette style to spring up around it, just as with real mail. Here are some tips:

Be polite. The written word tends to sound stronger and more dogmatic than speech. Sarcasm and little jokes don’t always work.

Don’t write anything when you are annoyed. If you get a message that you find totally obnoxious, don’t answer it right away! You will be sorry if you do, because you will overreact and look just as obnoxious yourself. How do we know this? We used to do it, too. Everyone does at first, until they learn not to take e-mail too seriously. The exchange of needlessly obnoxious messages is so common that it has a name: flaming. Don’t do it.

Be brief.

Be sure to sign your messages. The header shows where a message comes from, but your recipient may not remember who you are from your cryptic e-mail address.

Use normal punctuation and capitalization. That is, DON’T CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING. It looks as though you are shouting, and that’s not polite (see the first tip in this list).

Watch out for acronyms. E-mail is full of them, and you had better know what the common ones mean. A list of acronyms is at the end of this sidebar.

Don’t assume that e-mail is private. Any recipient of your mail can easily forward it to other people. Some mail addresses are really mailing lists that redistribute messages to many other people. Also, glitches in the mail system may send your messages to various electronic dead-letter offices. In one famous case, a mistaken mail address sent a message to tens of thousands of readers. It started “Darling, at last we have a way to send messages that is completely private. . . .”

If you need to indicate emotion, most people use emoticons, little pictures made up of characters to look like faces. If you see :-), for example, just look at it sideways: You see a little smiley face, which usually means that whatever you just read was a joke. (You get a sad face if you use the other parenthesis for the mouth.) Some people — particularly those who use CompuServe — type <grin> or <g> or <smile>. (An opposing viewpoint says that if you need one of those emotion things, rewriting your message to make it clearer what you mean is a better idea.)

Here’s a list of the most common e-mail acronyms:

BTW	By The Way
IANMTU	I Am Not Making This Up
IMHO	In My Humble Opinion
IOW	In Other Words
PITA	Pain In The Armpit
PMFJI	Pardon Me For Jumping In
ROFL	Rolling On Floor, Laughing
RSN	Real Soon Now (ha!)
RTFM	Read the Manual (that is, you could have looked it up yourself)
TIA	Thanks In Advance
YMMV	Your Mileage May Vary (you may not have the same experiences)

As of this writing, most outbound mail servers don’t need a password, but some do. Ask your ISP for local details.

Sometimes, just to try to confuse you, people refer to either or both of these as a mail server. In general, if you’re not sure, you can stop someone and say, “wait, do you mean an inbound or an outbound mail server?” and expect to get a helpful answer. Inbound means the mail is coming in for you; outbound means you’re sending it.