The mail/rmail Utility

You can use mail, the mail user agent to compose and send messages to users. The mail command, when used without arguments, displays all the messages, with the last received message displayed first. For each message, mail prints a ? prompt, and reads a line from the standard input to determine the disposition of the message. mail exits automatically when the last message is displayed. It provides a set of command-line options to alter the messages being printed.

You can use the command mail -e to check for new mail messages. You can also edit the mailfile to alter the functioning of mail. For example, you can include the following line in mailfile to forward all mail addressed to the owner to a given machine or person:

Forward to <person>

This is used especially for forwarding mail to a given machine in a multiple-machine environment. The Forward option requires read-write group permission and mail group ID in the mailfile.

Unlike mail, you can use rmail only to send messages. UUCP uses rmail as a security precaution.

For more information on mail and rmail, type man 1M mail at the HP-UX prompt.