MAIL(1)

NAME
mail - send and receive electronic mail

SYNOPSIS
mail [-dpqrv] [-f file] [user]

OPTIONS

EXAMPLES

DESCRIPTION

Mail is an extremely simple electronic mail program. It can be used to send or receive email on a single MINIX system, in which case it functions as user agent and local delivery agent. If the flag MAILER is defined in mail.c, it can also call a transport agent to handle remote mail as well. No such agent is supplied with MINIX.

When called by user with no arguments, it examines the mailbox /usr/spool/mail/user, prints one message (depending on the -r flag), and waits for one of the following commands:

	<newline>	Go to the next message
	-	Print the previous message
	!command	Fork off a shell and execute command
	CTRL-D	Update the mailbox and quit (same as q)
	d	Delete the current message and go to the next one
	q	Update the mailbox and quit (same as CTRL-D)
	p	Print the current message again
	s [file]	Save message in the named file
	x	Exit without updating the mailbox

To send mail, the program is called with the name of the recipient as an
argument.  The mail is sent, along with a postmark line containing the date.
For local delivery, a file named after the recipient in the directory
/usr/spool/mail must be writable.

If the directory /usr/spool/mail does not exist then the mail is
dumped on the console, so that system programs have a way to notify
a user on a system that does not have a mail spool.