Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet

THE

ach the other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and your recipient). The other advantage is that once you master the basics, you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries. You'll see how to do this later, along with learning how to transfer program and data files through e-mail. E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. You send your message when it's convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their convenience. No more telephone tag. And while a phone call across the country or around the world can quickly result in huge phone bills, e-mail lets you exchange vast amounts of mail for only a few pennies - even if the other person is i

use

ourself when you first logged on. Hit

bj

y

e

uld close your "envelope" and mail it off (you could also hit enter once and then, on a blank line, type a period at the beginning of the line and hit enter again). You've just sent your first e-mail message. And because you're sending mail to yourself, rather than to someone somewhere else on the Net, your message has already arrived, as we'll see in a moment. If you had wanted, you could have even written your message on your own computer and then uploaded it into this electronic "envelope." There are a couple of good reasons to do this with long or involved messages. One is that once you hit enter at the end of a line in "mail" you can't readily fix any mistakes on that line (unless you use some special commands to c

a

hit

sees "mail" without

in your mailbox rathe

lain-vanilla Unix s

on Apr 24 18:34:15 PDT

/adamg": 1 messa

t Jan 15 20:0

your mail messages are put, which again, is not something you'll likely need to know. The second line also tells you how many messages are in your mailbox, how many have come in since the last time you looked and how many messages you haven't read yet. It's the third line that is of real interest - i

sag

Jan 15 20

by eff.org

ent for adamg); Sat, 15

nder: ada

5 Jan 1994 2

am Gaffi

99204270134.AA

ad

ect:

tus

s only

ference between your local time and Greenwich Mean Time - as at the end of line 4 above). If this had been a long message, it would just keep scrolling across and down your screen - unless the people who run your public- access site have set it up to pause every 24 lines. One way to deal with a message that doesn't stop is to use your telecommunication software's logging or text-buffer function. Start it before you hit the number of the message you want to see. Your computer will ask you what you want to call the file you're about

ad

ct: R

ssage to its sender. The computer also automatically inserts a subject line, by adding "Re:" to the original subject. From here, it's just like writing

one more to

Type a lowercase q to exit your mailbox. If you type a q without first hitting d, your message is transferred to a file called mbox. This file is where all read, but un-deleted messages go. If yo

-f

for you to know for sure unless you get a reply from the other person. So now you're ready to send e-mail to other people on the Net. Of course, you need somebody's address to send them mail. How do you get it? Alas, the simplest answer is not what you'd call the most elegant: you call them up on the phone or write them a letter on paper and ask them. Residents of the electronic frontier are only beginning to develop the equivalent of phone books, and the ones that exist today are far from complete (still, later on, in Chapter 6, we'll show you how to use some of these directories). Eventually, you'll start corresponding with people, which means you'll want to know how to address mail to them. It's vital to know how to do this, becaus

orld.s

boat owners, Internet computer owners always name their machines). Domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the U.S., what country it's located in. Large organizations may have more than one computer or ga

gov and .mil for government and military agencies .net

name, the part of the address after the @ sign, never has to be capitalized. It's all a fairly simple system that works very well, except, again, it's vital to get the address exactly right - just as you have to dial a phone number exactly right. Send a message to tomg@unm.edu (which is the University of New Mexico) when you meant to send it to tomg@umn.edu (the University of Minnesota), and your letter will either bounce back to you undelivered, or go to the wrong person. If your message is bounced back to you as undeliverable, you'll get an ominous looking-message from MAILER-DAEMON (actually a rather benign Unix program that exists to handle mail), with an evil-looking header followed by the text of your message. Sometimes, you can tell what went wrong by looking at the first few lines of the bounced message. Besides an incorrect address, it's possible you

site!other

many Unix computers. This means that addressing mail to such a site (or even responding to a message you received from one) could confuse the poor computer to no e

site\!other

rcase r - you may get an error message and you'll have to create a brand-new message.

c@oes.

" line blank. As a

d q

ing a little down,

oral-s

okie-like saying. If you asked for moral support, you'll also get back a fortune-cookie-like saying, only supposedly more uplifting. This particular "mail server" is run by Oregon State University. Its main pu

d h

itehouse.gov. Or if the vice president will do, write vice-president@whitehouse.gov. The "mail" program is actually a very powerful one and a Netwide standard, at least on Unix computers. But it can be hard to figur

- A BE

hat uses menus to help you navigate through mail. Most U

l

ing mail, along with a list of commands you c

/mail/adamg' with 38 m

ew File University of Londo 5 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (64) New File X.500 service at A 6 Aug 30 Peter Scott/Manage (39) New File DATAPAC Informatio 7 Aug 28 Peter Scott/Manage (67) Propo

ollowing commands by pre

l, m)ail a message, r)ep

s . j = move do

e, type a lower-case d. You can do this while reading the message. Or, if you are in the menu, move the cursor to the message's line and then hit d. When you're done with elm, type a lower-case q. The program will ask if you really want to delete the messages you marked. Then, it will ask you if you want to move any messages you've read but haven't marked for deletion to a "received" file. For now, hit your n key. Elm has a major disadvantage for the beginner. The default text editor it generally calls up when you hit your r or m key is often a program called emacs. Unixoids swear by emacs, but everybody else almost always finds it impossible. Unfortunately

- AN EVEN

lowed by her address. Then, when you want to send that person a message, you only have to type in her first name or nickname, and pine automatically inserts her actual address. The address book also lets you set up a mailing list. This feature allows you to send the same message to a number of people at once. What really sets pine apart is its built-in text editor, w

Whe

uld bring up a prompt asking you for the word to look for. Some of pine's commands are a tad peculiar (control-V for "page down" for example), which comes from being based on a variant of emacs (whi

i

e systems may not yet have it online. But it's so easy to use, you shoul

SM

dy else might take as an insult. To try to keep such misunderstandings from erupting into bitter disputes, we have smileys. Tilt your head to the left and look at the following sideways. :-). Or simply :). This is your basic "smiley." Use it

ri

ll see it as *grin* or

r smileys

Wi

Fr

Surp

aring

Abe L

last two are a

E-MAIL TO OT

re now connected through "gateways" that allow the passing of e-mail. Here's a list of som

ica

m a user's name and a

@aol

to you need only put your Net address in

TM

message to us

r would send mail t

et!dom

world.std.com, your corresponde

world.std

tn

ecause Bitnet addresses do not always translate well into an Internet form. If this happens, you can send mail through one of two Internet/Bitnet gateways. First, change the @ in the address to a %, so that you get username%site.bitnet. Then add either @vm.marist.edu or @cunyvm.cuny.edu, so that

puS

example: 73727.545@compuserve.com. Note that some CompuServe users must pay extra to receive mail from the Internet. If you know CompuServe users who want to send

:YourID@Y

orld.std.com. Note that both t

lp

phi user, the form is

do

es the BBS is in (1 represents the U.S. and Canada, 2 Europe and Israel, 3 Pacific Asia, 4 South America). The second number represents the BBS's network, while the final number is the BBS's "FidoNode'' number in that network. If your correspondent only gives you

.n32

net.org'' at

org. Then add "FirstN

Name@f190.n322

Fidonet correspondent should address a net-mail message to UUCP (not your name) in the "to:" field. In the node-number field, they should type in the node number of the Fidonet/UUCP gateway (if the gateway system is in the same regional network as their system, they need only type the last number, for example, 390 instead of 322/390). Then, the first line of the message has to be your Internet address, followed by a blank line. After that, the person can write the message and send it. Bec

E

genie.com" to the end of the GEnie u

IM

ccount, add "@mcimail.com to the end of th

12@mci

@mcima

l get a mail message back from MCI giving you their names and numerical addres

a user w

Name

At the EMS prompt,

te

Net address at

ac

a Peacenet use

ame@i

an use your regular ad

od

Note that Prodigy us

net e

COMMANDS YOU CA

a reputation as being even more complex than MS-DOS, in most cases, a few basic, and simple, commands should be all you'll ever need. If your own computer uses MS-DOS or PC-DOS, the basic concepts will seem very familiar - but watch out for the cd command, which works differently enough from the similarly named DOS command that it will drive you crazy. Also, unlike MS-DOS, Unix is case sensitive - if you type commands or directory name

OS "type" command. To paus

file

want to see. Hitting control-C will sto

e f

ing or uploading text files to your name or home director

t>

finished a line and you have to hit return at the end of each line) or upload something into t

mand. To change from your pre

irec

example: \stuff\text), Unix uses a / (for example: /stuff/text). So to chan

tuff

backslash if the subdirectory comes off the directory you're

d

en the cd and the two periods - this is

a file. Th

ile1

1 to file2 (or overwr

s you what's in the directory, similar to the

| m

directory. The basic ls command does not list "hidden" files, such as the .logi

r ls -a

each file in bytes and tell you

the MS-DOS r

ile1

e command can also be used to

ile1

le1 to your N

tes a f

fil

are: when you hit ente

hing for, copying or

ou are not sure of t

m

the follo

nual.txt,

you're sure about all b

exam

m

alled mane, but not

THINGS

, try control-X, control-C (in other words, hit your control key and your X key at the same time, followed by control and C). If worse comes to worse, you can hang up. * In elm, you accidentally hit the D key for a message you want to save. Type the number of the message, hit enter and then U, which will "un-delete" the message. This works only before you exit Elm; once you quit, the message is gone. * You try to upload an ASCII message you've written on your own computer into a message you're preparing in Elm or Pine and you get a lot of left brackets, capital Ms, Ks and

t>

n't cleared out your Elm mailbox in awhile, and you accidentally hit "y" when you meant to hit "n" (or vice-versa) when exiting and now all your messages have disappeared. Look in your News directory (at the