7.2 Reading Letters

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

You have mail

or

You have new mail

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

No mail for username

Otherwise, you will 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 letters received, and their status.

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

• Status: indicates whether a letter is new (N), unread (U), or read (no symbol). A ">" at the beginning of a line indicates the current letter. Deleted letters are marked with an asterisk (*).

• Number: indicates order in which letter was received.

• Sender: indicates name of user (and usually machine) letter came from.

• Time: indicates date and time letter was sent.

• Size: indicates number of lines/number of characters in letter.

• Subject: indicates sender-designated subject of letter.

When you have a large number of letters in your mailbox, the displayed list may not show all of your mail. If this is the case, 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 letter in the mailbox list (marked with >), press Return. Pressing Return again will display the next letter. To read any letter in the list, type its number and press Return.