Most modern email clients allow the user to select whether they want
to send their emails in plain text or in
HTML. The advantage of HTML formatted email is that they are are
graphical (GUI). The particular font can be specified, the layout is
very controllable, textures, pictures and backgrounds can be added; all
this makes for a visually appealing message when it gets to the
recipient.
On the other hand, plain text email is just that — plain text.
They are not fancy, there are no pictures embedded in the email, there are
no special fonts. Plain text emails are simple.
The term plain text refers to textual data in ASCII format. Plain
text (also called clear text) is the most
portable format because it is supported by nearly every application on
every machine.
This chapter will discuss two plain text email clients,
PINE and mutt.
Pine (acronym for pine is
not elm or Program for Internet News and Email is a
character-based email client for UNIX systems.
To launch pine, type pine as
a command at the system prompt. After starting
pine, the Main Menu screen
appears.
Each pine screen has a similar layout: the top
line tells you the screen name and additional useful information,
below that is the work area (on the Main Menu
screen, the work area is a menu of options), then the message/prompt
line, and finally the menu of commands.
From the Main Menu you can choose to read
online help, compose and send a message, look at an index of your mail
messages, open or maintain your mail folders, update your address
book, configure pine, and quit
pine. There are additional options listed at the
bottom of the screen as well.
To write a message, press [C] (Compose). You see
the Compose Message screen.
Different commands are available to you when your cursor is in
different fields on this screen. To see additional commands available
when your cursor is in the Message Text field, type
[Ctrl]-[G] (Get Help). For example, to
move around, use the arrow keys or
[Ctrl]-[N] (Next line) and
[Ctrl]-[P] (Previous line); to correct
typing errors, use [Backspace] or
[Delete].
In the command menu above, the ^ character is
used to indicate the Control key. This character means you must hold
down the Control ([Ctrl]) key while you press the
letter for each command.
When you want to leave Pine, press [Q]
(Quit).
To view a message in the Message Index
screen, use the arrow keys to highlight the message you want to view.
Press [V] (ViewMsg) or press [Enter] to
read a selected message. To see the next message, press
[N] (NextMsg). To see the previous message, press
[P] (PrevMsg) To return from your message to the
Message Index, press [I] (Index).
For addition help with pine, refer to the
pine man page. To view this man page, type the
command man pine at a shell prompt.
Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based
mail client for Unix operating systems.
Mutt's configuration file,
~/.muttrc. gives mutt its
flexibility and configurability. It is also this file that might give
new users problems. The number of options that mutt
has available to it are truly astounding. mutt
allows the user to control about every function
mutt uses to send, receive, and read your mail. As
is true with all powerful software, it takes time to understand the
features and what they can do for you.
Most of the options are invoked using the set
or unset commands, with either boolean or string
values, e.g. set folder = ~/Mail.
All configuration options can be changed at any time by typing a
[:] followed by the relevant command. For example
:unset help turns off the handy keyboard command
hints at the top of the screen. To turn those hints back on, press
up-arrow to retrieve the last command and change it so it says
:set help.
If you cannot remember the command you want to use, there is always
tab-completion to help you.
You do not have to type all your preferred configuration commands
each time you run mutt, you can save them in a file
which is loaded every time the program starts up. This configuration
file needs to exist in your home directory, it has to be called either
~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc.
When you launch mutt, the first thing you see is a screen with a list of email
messages. This initial menu is called the index.
These messages are in a default mail folder, often called the
mailspool, that you can think of as your
inbox. Use the [K] and [J] keys on your
keyboard to move the highlighted cursor up and down the list of
messages.
In the index or pager views, use the [R] key to
reply to a message or the [M] key to create a new
one. Mutt will prompt for the To: address and the
Subject: line. A text editor (defined by your
$EDITOR environmental variable in the configuration file) will then
launch allowing you to compose your message. Type away, when you save
and exit, you are done.
After the editor, mutt drops you into the
compose menu, here you can fine-tune your message headers, change the
encoding, add file attachments or simply hit the [Y]
key to say yes and send your email on its way.
To learn more, refer to the man pages for
muttrc and mutt (type
man muttrc or man mutt at the
shell prompt). You may also find the mutt manual to
be very helpful. The mutt manual is installed in
/usr/share/doc/mutt-1.2.x,
where x is the version number of
mutt installed on your system.
