Customizing Mail Transmission and Storage

As you compose a mail message on the keyboard, the Simplified Chinese Solaris Mail Tool sends the characters in EUC (8-bit) format to the workstation. But for transmitting the message across the network, receiving, and storing received messages, the tool has several standard transmission formats available.

Mail Transmission Formats

The initial default setting for mail transmission is the commonly used (7-bit) ISO 2022 encoding standard. This is the same as having the following command line in a user's .mailrc file:

set encoding=zh.iso2022-7 

However, Mail Tool can instead transmit via EUC format as directed by the following command line in a user's ~/.mailrc file:

set encoding=zh.euc

To set Mail Tool to use one of these transmission formats, perform the following steps:

1. Put the encoding=zh.format command line in your .mailrc file.

2. Follow the directions in the following section "Making .mailrc Changes Take Effect."

Mail Reception and Storage Formats

The Simplified Chinese Solaris Mail Tool stores incoming mail in the /var/mail directory in whatever format the mail arrives in.

Then, as Mail Tool reads the messages from the spool file and sends them to the screen display, it converts the text from the original ISO 2022 to EUC format, for display on the screen.

When you then direct Mail Tool to save a message, its initial default setting is to save the message in EUC format, regardless of the format originally received. This initial default setting is the same as having the following command line in the user's .mailrc file:

set folderconv 

To have mail stored in its originally received format (ISO2022-7 or other formats) and not converted, use a command line, such as the following, in the user's .mailrc file:

set nofolderconv 

The following section explains how to make such command lines take effect.

Making .mailrc Changes Take Effect

Whenever Mail Tool is started up from the Workspace Programs menu, or a mailx session is started at a system prompt, the mail utility uses the settings in ~/.mailrc. After a Mail Tool or session is running it ignores changes in the .mailrc file. So changes to .mailrc affect only Mail Tool or mail sessions that are started after the changes are saved.

However, changes made to .mailrc after a mailx session has been started can be put into effect in that existing mailx session using the source .mailrc command issued inside the session, as follows:

system% mailx 
(Ongoing mailx session during which .mailrc is changed,
for example from another Shell Tool window.)&
 source .mailrc
(Continuing mailx session during which new .mailrc settings are in effect.) 
& q
system% 

In the above example, the user types q to quit the mailx program.

Report of Incoming Mail

comsat is the server process that listens for reports of incoming mail and notifies users, who have requested notification, when mail arrives. To be able to display Simplified Chinese for this notification, the following steps should be taken:

The file /etc/inet/inetd.conf has a line:

comsat dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/incomsat in.comsat

This line should be manually edited by superuser (root) or changed by running install_comsat.

comsat dgram udp wait root /usr/SUNWale/sbin/in.comsat in.comsat -l zh