Unlike pine, elm must be started in a window with at least 14 rows, or it will complain and quit.

After you retrieve your mail, elm reads your messages and displays your messages as shown in Figure 11.4 (just as the pine mail program does).

Figure 11.4.
The elm mail program
displays messages in a
list.

As in pine, you can use elm to delete, forward, save, or compose messages. You can customize some of its features by typing an o while in elm's main display. These custom features are saved in an elmrc file under the .elm folder in your home directory.

This book doesn't go into all the details about the elm program. Make sure to read the manual page for elm before you start using it. If you'd like more information, you can also check

http://www.myxa.com/elm.html

Subscribing to Mailing Lists

Once you feel confident that your mail system is working, you may want to subscribe to a mailing list. Mailing lists are handled by automatic mail servers, and work by relaying messages generated to all members of a mailing list. One smart way to subscribe to mailing lists is to sign up for a digest version, in which the day's message traffic is condensed into a single or twice-daily mailing.

You can find out more about mailing lists by browsing to

http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html

One query sent to a mailing list server at the University of Georgia returned:

Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 19:12:15 -0500

From: "L-Soft list server at UGA (1.8c)" <LISTSERV@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>

To: bball@staffnet.com

Subject: Output of your job "bball"



> lists global

There   are    currently   14,869    public   LISTSERV   lists    known   to

LISTSERV@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU. Without  a search string, the  listing generated by

the LIST  GLOBAL command would be  over 44,500 lines  long and add up  to an

estimated 1486k of data. Please use a search string to limit the size of the

file that  will be returned  to you. For  instance, "LIST GLOBAL  CHEM" will

return a description of all the lists related to chemistry (lists whose name

or topic contains the string "CHEM").

Chances are that you'll find a mailing list that will interest you. Have fun!

Configuring procmail and Writing Recipes to Fight Spam

We're all used to getting junk mail or telemarketing calls. Day after day, we receive offers for credit cards, home equity loans, new long-distance service, or great deals on prime cuts of pot roast at the local food market. You can do something about unwanted postal mail, junk faxes, and telemarketing calls, but there's no current regulation regarding junk email.

You can, however, use procmail, which is found under the /usr/bin directory, to filter your incoming mail. You'll need to create a directory, create several files, write a small script, and customize how your incoming mail is handled by writing short filters, or procmail recipes. It will only take you a minute or so to set up your system to organize incoming mail and dispose of junk mail.

The first step is to create a text file, called .procmailrc, in your home directory. Then, type in the following, specifying the name of your mail directory (if you use pine, the directory is mail), the location of the .procmail directory (which you'll soon create), and the name of your procmail filter file:

MAILDIR=$HOME/mail

PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail

INCLUDERC=$HOME/rc.mailfilter

Save this file. Next, create a text file called .forward in your home directory. This file should contain the following line:

"|IFS=' ` && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #username"

This command line controls procmail, and you should use your username instead of username. Now, make your .forward file world-readable, and your home directory

world-searchable with the chmod command. See the following example (making sure you're in your home directory):

# chmod 644 .forward

# chmod a+x .

You're almost done. Now, with the mkdir command, create a directory called .procmail, change directories into it, and create a text file called rc.mailfilter.

This file will contain your procmail filters, or recipes. While these recipes can be extremely complex (so complex in fact, that you can write your own mail delivery service), this section presents simple recipes to get you started.

First, examine a sample message's mail headers (which contain the From:, To:, or Subject: lines). The British MG sports cars digest has the following subject line in each message:

Subject: mgs@autox.team.net digest #905 Mon Nov 17 10:09:07 MST 1997

Each digest message can contain almost 100,000 characters, and is sent twice a day, so it would be nice to have all these digests go into their own mail folder, which you'll call mgdigest. So, you'll enter

:0:

*^Subject:.*digest

mgdigest

This small recipe will save any incoming message with a subject line containing the word digest into a mail file called mgdigest in your mail program's mail directory. Note that you don't have to create this mail file yourself. It will be created for you when you first retrieve mail, and procmail finds a match. You can also use another recipe to have all mail files from your friends saved to a specific folder, for example:

:0:

*^From:.*aol.com

AOL

"OK," you're asking, "but what about junk email?" Well, you know what you want to do with junk email—trash it! For Linux users, there's a special place to which you can send junk email: the old bit bucket, /dev/null. So if you get an unwanted message from a place like hotlips4u.com, you can send this type of junk to the boneyard with

:0:

^From:.*hotlips4u.com

/dev/null

The mail message won't be stored on your hard drive, and you won't have to bother with any mail from that address again. Using this approach is simplistic, however, and if you get a lot of junk mail, you may want to experiment with more complex recipes, which can