Email is a two way street for most people so you want to be
able to send something back. The way
MH handles sending mail can be a bit
difficult to follow at first, but it allows for incredible
flexibility. The first thing MH does
is to copy a components file into your outgoing email. A
components file is basically a skeleton email letter with stuff
like the To:
and Subject:
headers already in it. You are then sent into your editor where
you fill in the header information and then type the body of
your message below the dashed lines in the message. When you
leave the editor, the whatnow
program is run.
When you are at the What now?
prompt you can
tell it to send
, list
,
edit
, push
, and
quit
. Most of these commands are
self-explanatory. So the message sending process involves
copying a component file, editing your email, and then telling
the whatnow
program what to do with your
email.
The comp
program has a few useful command line
options. The most important one to know right now is the
-editor
option. When MH is installed the
default editor is usually a program called
prompter
which comes with MH. It is not a very
exciting editor and basically just gets the job done. So when
you go to compose a message to someone you might want to use
comp -editor /usr/bin/vi
or comp -editor
/usr/local/bin/pico
instead. Once you have run
comp you are in your editor and you see
something that looks like this:
You need to put the person you are sending the mail to
after the To:
line. It works the same way for the
other headers also, so you would need to put your subject
after the Subject:
line. Then you would just put
the body of your message after the dashed lines. It may seem a
bit simplistic since a lot of email programs have special
requesters that ask you for this information but there really
is no point to that. Plus this really gives you excellent
flexibility.
freebsd-rave@FreeBSD.org
cc:
Subject:And on the 8th day God created the FreeBSD core team
--------
Wow this is an amazing operating system. Thanks!
You can now save this message and exit your editor. You
will see the What now?
prompt and you can type in
send
or s
and hit
return. Then the FreeBSD core team will receive
their just rewards. As I mentioned earlier, you can also use
other commands at the What now?
prompt.
For example you can use quit
, if you do not want
to send the message.
The forw
command is stunningly similar. The
big difference being that the message you are forwarding is
automatically included in the outgoing message. When you run
forw
it will forward your current message. You can
always tell it to forward something else by doing something
like forw 23
and then message number 23 will be
put in your outgoing message instead of the current message.
Beyond those small differences forw
functions
exactly the same as comp
. You go through the exact
same message sending process.
The repl
command will reply to the
current message, unless you give it a different message to
reply to. repl
will do its best to go ahead
and fill in some of the email headers already. So you will
notice that the To:
header already has the
address of the recipient in there. Also the
Subject:
line will already be filled in.
You then go about the normal message composition process and
you are done. One useful command line option to know here is
the -cc
option. You can use
all
, to
,
cc
, me
after the
-cc
option to have repl
automatically add the various addresses to the
Cc:
list in the message. You have probably
noticed that the original message is not included. This is
because most MH setups are
configured to do this from the start.
The components
file is usually in
/usr/local/lib/mh
. You can copy that file
into your MH Mail directory and
edit to contain what you want it to contain. It is a fairly
basic file. You have various email headers at the top, a
dashed line and then nothing. The comp
command just copies this components
file
and then edits it. You can add any kind of valid RFC822 header
you want. For instance you could have something like this in
your components
file:
MH would then copy this
components file and throw you into your editor. The
components
file is fairly simple. If you
wanted to have a signature on those messages you would just
put your signature in that components
file.
The replcomps
file is a bit more complex. The
default replcomps
looks like this:
It is in the same basic format as the
components
file but it contains quite a few extra
formatting codes. The %(lit)
command makes room
for the address. The %(formataddr)
is a function
that returns a proper email address. The next part is
%<
which means if and the
{reply-to}
means the reply-to field in the
original message. So that might be translated this way:
As you can tell MH formatting
can get rather involved. You can probably decipher what most
of the other functions and variables mean. All of the
information on writing these format strings is in the
MH-Format manual page. The really nice thing is that once you
have built your customized replcomps
file
you will not need to touch it again. No other email program
really gives you the power and flexibility that
MH gives you.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.