It failed because the next line contained the "." character by itself, which
is the "end of message, send now" command. Read ahead and you'll see.
Note, everywhwere you see ">.", you should instead use "." only.
Unfortunately, that character terminates the message. Here it is again...
----------------------------
Now, for some fun. Rewrite this text with your address in it:
mail your@address.com
test1
This is the first test
>.
mail your@address.com
test2
This is the second test
It has two lines
>.
x
Mark and copy the text to the clipboard.
Go back to the Unix shell and PASTE. Watch what happens. (Ctrl-V probably
won't work, you'll have to go through the menu. If your terminal program
has a "send text" option you could put the above text into a text file and
send it.)
Now check your mail to confirm it was sent okay.
Yes?
Now you're ready to do it on the Og.
Log in again to your shell account using the Og.
When you get to the prompt, repeat the exercises above in the little Og
window and see how it works the same.
-----Working offline-----
After you're logged in using OgComm, get into mail by typing "mail" at the
prompt.
At the & prompt, type "p *" but DON'T HIT RETURN yet.
Grab your pen, and select File/Open Dwnld.txt, then hit return. After the
mail has scrolled by, select File/Close Dwnld.txt. Then exit mail by
entering "x".
Now run Text Editor and open documents/dwnld.txt. Voila! There's your mail.
While still in Text Editor, open a blank file. Type the same text that you
copy/pasted earlier and save it as upload.txt. This is how you will compose
any new mail on the Og. IMPORTANT: if upload.txt is still open in Text
Editor, OgComm may not be able to read it. Fn-F3 didn't seem to work
either. I go to File/Switch Document and load any other document before
exiting Text Editor.
Go back to OgComm. Be sure you're at the Unix prompt and select File/Send
Upload.txt. Away it goes! You've just read and written mail offline.
Hints:
-In OgComm, select Term/No Screen Update while uploading or downloading
files. It will go much faster, OgComm is very slow at redrawing the screen.
While downloading with screen update off, you see a series of "#" characters
to let you know the download is in process. When the file's done, the
characters stop drawing. While uploading, a single "#" will inform you the
upload is done. Term/Screen Update will restore screen redraw.
-I keep a copy of all important email addresses handy on the Og so I don't
have to remember them all.
-There is an "escape" function in mail that lets you, among other things,
add a signature file by using the code "_m .sig" where .sig is the name of
your signature file and "_" is the escape character specified in the .mailrc
file. (The default is something else, I forget, but it was not available on
the Og keyboard) Both the .mailrc and the.sig file exist on the Unix
account, not on the Og.
------Message management-----
It's up to you how you want to handle mail on your server. You may want to
delete all the messages after you've downloaded them "d *", but keep in
mind, if anything went wrong with the Og file system, you could lose all
those messages. I've never had a problem, but just keep it in mind. After
using "p *" all those messages should be marked as read. There may be a
command to use instead of "p *" that only lists unread messages, so you can
leave them on the server without downloading them again and again.
Also, your sent mail is not being stored anywhere. It's up to you to deal
with old upload.txt files. You'll be overwriting that file the next time
you want to send mail, so you may want to archive them.
Also, if you're on any mailing lists (like the Og list for example), you may
have too much mail to download, expecially if your Og is low on storage
space (another benefit of an external modem, use those RAM cards). You may
want to look into Procmail to filter your mail. It's beyond the scope of
this document, but I used procmail to send all Og list mail to a separate
file, so it wasn't downloaded by this method. (I basically just blew it off
until I got home from the honeymoon.) Type "man procmail" at the Unix
prompt to learn more, or search for it on the net, that's how I learned it.
CONCLUSION
This is definitely a hack. I tried to write a program in Qbasic that would
let you use the Wyndmail email software to read and write off line. The
code almost worked, but there was some glitch in the way Qbasic writes to
text files. I've since removed the DOS mode (thanks to a PCMCIA modem
induced crash that required a 'hold down the C' total reboot), but may put
it back in and try again to write the code in C.
For a hack, it works really well. It's been completely reliable for me.
You just have to be sure to format your upload.txt file correctly.
Remember:
mail name@address.com
type the subject on this line
Start the body here
You can include blank lines
Whatever
When you're done, just use the period on it's own line
You can even include a signature.
_m .sig
>.
mail name@address.com
second message
Ogers,
You can do multiple messages in a single file
>.
x
Using this method, I've been able to get in and out being logged in for only
a couple minutes at a time (important when calling back to my ISP long
distance).
I'd love to hear if other folks have success with this, or if they have any
improvements. Programmers, please look at
http://www.mcs.com/~halleen/shareware for my notes about this system. All
we need is a program to do some text translation and we could use the
(freely downloadable) Wyndmail software to read and write instead of Text
Editor.
Good Luck!
----------------
Michael Halleen The Grand Area www.mcs.com/~halleen/
Chicago, IL PGP me for my finger