Solaris Advanced User's Guide

Reading Messages

If you have mail, mailx notifies you each time you log in with the message

You have mail

You have new mail

To read your messages, type mailx at a command prompt and press Return. If no mail is waiting for you, you will see the message:

No mail for username

Otherwise, you see a list similar to the following:

$ mailx
Mail version 4.0 Thu Jan 16 12:59:09 PST 1992  Type ? for help.
“/var/mail/rose”: 4 messages 1 new 2 unread
    1 rose@texas        Fri Feb 14 12:01 21/453 to someone who
 U  2 hank@fretful      Fri Feb 14 18:31 19/353 so lonely I
 U  3 farmer@freeway    Sat Feb 15 10:22 24/557 looks like my
>N  4 hoover@woofer     Sun Feb 16 23:59 14/280 big old furry

&

The mailx program displays information about itself (version number and date) and instructions for getting help (Type ? for help).

On the next line, mailx specifies the location of your mailbox, the number of messages received, and their status.

Next, mailx shows a numbered list of the messages in your mailbox. From left to right, the columns in each line specify:

Status: Indicates whether a message is new (N), unread (U), or read (no symbol). A “>” at the beginning of a line indicates the current message. Deleted messages are marked with an asterisk (*).
Number: Indicates the order in which message was received.
Sender: Indicates the name of the user (and usually machine) the message came from.
Time: Indicates the date and time the message was sent.
Size: Indicates the number of lines or the number of characters in message.
Subject: Indicates the sender-designated subject of the message.

When you have several messages in your mailbox, the displayed list might not show all of your mail. If this situation applies, type:

z – To display the next screenful of mail headers
h- – To display the previous screenful of mail headers
h – To redisplay the list of mail headers at any time

To view the current message in the mailbox list (marked with >), press Return. Press Return again to display the next message. To read any message in the list, type its number and press Return.