Reading Email with Pine: Composing email

Composing email consists of starting a new note, typing in the email address of the recipient, adding a short but meaningfule subject line, writing the message and then sending it by hitting ^X (Control-X). The importance of a meaningful subject line cannot be overemphasized enough. Most messages are sorted by using keywords from the subject line.

Keyboard Commands to note while composing email:

• To send a note, hit ^X
• To cancel a note (do not send the note), hit ^C.
• To postpone a note (come back later and resume working on it), hit ^O.
• When filling out the To: address, you can also use the nicknames of the recipient as they exist in your addressbook. You can also use ^T to go your addressbook if you do not remember the nickname or address. This is specific to the location of the cursor. If the cursor is in the Message Text area, hitting ^T will invoke the spell check.
• In the header, you will notice that a field named Attchmnt. This field is for attaching files to send to the recipient. These files are MIME encoded for safe transport over email and can be decoded by the recipient. It is a fast way to send small files to people. Generally you may want to avoid this if the files are over 100K.

Special sending modes:

• To send mail to multiple people simultaneously, simply type in the multiple addresses in the To: field seprated by commas.
• To send people courtesy copies (carbon copies) of an email, list their addresses in the CC: field. Multiple addresses can be separated by commas.
• To send people blind carbon copies of an email, you will first have to hit ^R to display all the optional fields in the header. Then add email addresses to whom this message is to be Blind CC'ed in the BCC: field.

From the main menu, select Compose Message and hit enter or hit 'C' from any place within pine

The compose screen looks like this. Note the fields at the top of the screen. The email address of the recipient is filled in the "To" field. Similarly, the CC field is filled with the addresses of the people who are to get copied on this message and the Subject field is filled with the subject of the message. Please see note regarding attachments above.

After the headers are filled in, you can type in the message in the Message Text area.

Once you are done composing the note, you can send it out by hitting Control-X (hold down the control key and hit X simultaneously). It is represented in the keyboard commands as a ^X. You will be prompted to send the message in the keyboard area.