MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 1

mailx(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities mailx(1)
After you type in the command to send a message, mailx asks you to enter the Subject of
the message (a brief description of what the message is about). You can now type in the text
of your message. Your message can consist of any number of lines, and may include blank
lines. When you finish entering the message, type a line consisting only of a tilde (˜), fol-
lowed by a dot (.); then press
ENTER. This tells mailx that the message is ready to be sent.
mailx puts the completed message into a file called the recipient’s system mailbox. The mes-
sage stays there until the recipient asks. At that point, the message is obtained from the sys-
tem mailbox and displayed on the recipient’s terminal. It is then saved in the recipient’s per-
sonal mailbox. Since this is usually a file named mbox under the recipient’s home directory,
mbox represents the personal mailbox and mailbox represents the system mailbox.
The simplest way to read incoming messages is to type the command mailx (with no
addresses on the command line). This starts an interactive session in which mailx lets you
read your mail and perform other operations. For example, you can display new messages,
delete old ones, reply to messages or forward them to someone else, and so on. When you are
performing operations in this way, you are in command mode. When you are typing in the text
of a message, you are in input mode.
A message consists of a sequence of header lines followed by the body of the message. The
header lines tell who sent the message, the time and date that it was sent, its subject, and so
on. mailx automatically creates header lines. Some of the common header lines are:
Cc: name name ...
Stands for carbon copies. This indicates that copies of this message are to be sent to
the specified recipients. The names of these recipients appear in the header lines of
everyone receiving the message.
Bcc: name name ...
Stands for blind carbon copies. This is similar to Cc: but the names of people
receiving carbon copies do not appear in the header lines of the message. Recipients
do not know that these people received a copy of the message.
Subject: text
Gives the subject of the message.
To: name name ...
Gives the names of people who were sent the message directly.
All messages are in one of the following states:
deleted You used a delete, dp,ordt command to delete the message, or you saved it using a
Save or save command and the variable
keepsave was not set. When mailx quits,
it deletes messages in this state.
1-306 Commands and Utilities