Sending Mail to Users on Other Systems

If your system is connected to other systems over a LAN (local area network) or other networking facility that supports elm, you can also send mail to users on other systems.

Host Names. Every workstation connected over a network has a unique host name (also known as a node name). To send mail to a user on another workstation, you must know the host name of the user's workstation.

This figure shows an example LAN with four workstations connected. The host names are research, market, develop, and sell.

Figure 7-7  Example host names on a network.

The host name of your own workstation is displayed in any File Manager or Toolbox window.

Figure 7-8  The host name is circled.

Mail Syntax when Mailing to Other Systems.  The general syntax used when mailing to a user on another workstation is either:

host is the host name of the workstation the person is on, and user is the person's unique user name. If the user you are sending to is at another organization, the syntax may also include that person's organization name (such as ucsd or hp), and the domain to which the organization belongs (such as edu for educational institutions, and com for commercial businesses). Your system administrator can tell you which syntax to use.

Examples.  Suppose you want to send mail to user john, who uses the workstation named sell. Then, in response to the elm prompt, you would type the following:

 

   john@sell

To send mail to arnie on your workstation, john on the sell workstation, and leopold on the research workstation, use the following addresses:

   arnie  john@sell  leopold@research

To send mail to mark who works for a university and davidm who works for the XYZ company, use the following addresses:

   mark@hub.ucsd.edu davidm@xyz.com

In the first part of this example, mark is the user name, hub is the hostname of Mark's workstation, ucsd is the abbreviation for "University of California at San Diego", and edu is the domain name for educational institutions. In the second part, davidm is the user name, xyz is the abbreviation for the XYZ Company, and com is the domain name for companies and businesses.