NAME
readmail — read mail from a mail folder or incoming mailbox
SYNOPSIS
readmail
[-ahnp]
[-f
folder]
[number-list|pattern]
DESCRIPTION
The
readmail
program displays messages from your incoming mailbox
or a specified mail folder.
Within the
elm
mail system (see
elm(1)
with no operands and optionally the
-h
or
-n
option,
readmail
displays the appropriate headers
and the body of the current message.
With the
number-list
operand and no options,
readmail
displays the corresponding messages and a summary of the headers
from your incoming mailbox.
With the
pattern
operand and no options,
readmail
displays the first message that matches the pattern
and a summary of the headers
from your incoming mailbox.
Options
readmail
supports the following options.
- -a
Print all messages that match
pattern.
If no pattern was specified, this option is ignored.
- -f folder
Use file
folder
for the operations instead of the incoming mailbox.
- -h
Include the entire header of the matched message or messages
when displaying their text.
The default is to display the
From:,
Date:,
and
Subject:
lines only.
- -n
Exclude all headers.
- -p
Put form feeds (Ctrl-L)
between message headers.
This is useful when printing sets of messages.
Operands
readmail
supports the following operands.
- number-list
A blank-separated list of the ordinal locations of messages in the mail file
(i.e., their "message numbers"), up to 25 at a time.
The character
$
means the last message in the mail file.
Similarly,
*
represents every message in the file
(i.e.,
1 2 3 ... $)
The message numbers are sorted into ascending order.
Thus,
1 3 2
produces the same output as
1 2 3.
- pattern
A string that is present in one of the messages.
This pattern can be typed in directly (no quotes)
if the words are separated by a single space in the actual message.
The pattern matching is case sensitive, so
Hello
and
hello
are not equivalent.
Leading digits (on the first word) are not permitted;
however, you can precede them with a space and quote the entire string,
if the space occurs in the message, as in
" 1st item of business"
.
EXAMPLES
If you are using
vi
to reply to a message from within the
elm
mail system,
you can insert the text of the current message with the command:
If you define an alias similar to:
alias rd='readmail $ | page' (Korn or POSIX shell)
alias rd 'readmail $ | page' (C shell)
you can use it with a program such
newmail
to peruse mail as it arrives,
without needing to start a mail system (see
newmail(1)).
AUTHOR
readmail
was developed by HP.
FILES
- /var/mail/loginname
Incoming mailbox
- $HOME/.elm/readmail
Temporary file for
elm
Printable version
