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NAME
mailto - Simple mutlimedia mail sending program
SYNOPSIS
mailto [-a] [-c] [-s] [recipient name(s)]
DESCRIPTION
The mailto program is a very simple user interface for send-
ing multimedia mail in MIME format, the proposed standard
format for multimedia Internet mail. It is modelled very
heavily on the Berkeley "mail" program. However it shares
NO code with that program -- it is a completely new imple-
mentation.
As its name implies, mailto is for sending mail, not for
reading it. None of the mail-reading features of the Berke-
ley mail program have been implemented in mailto.
Users who are already familiar with using the Berkeley mail
command to send mail should skip the following section,
which explains things that are already familiar to you from
that program. Subsequent sections focus on the enhanced
features that make this program different than Berkeley
mail, notably the ability to include rich text, multimedia
objects, and text in non-ASCII languages such as Hebrew or
Russian.
BASIC USE
[THIS SECTION MAY BE SAFELY SKIPPED BY READERS ALREADY FAMI-
LIAR WITH THE BERKELEY MAIL PROGRAM.]
The basic operation of mailto is very simple. If you just
type "mailto" you will be asked for a list of mail reci-
pients ("To:") a mail subject ("Subject:") and possibly a
list of people to receive a carbon copy of your message
("CC:"). Alternately, you can specify all of these things
on the command line. The "-s" option be used to specify the
subject, and the "-c" option can be used to specify the car-
bon copy address. All other command line arguments are
added to the To list. Thus the following command sends mail
to nsb and jxr, with a subject of "Test message" and a car-
bon copy to kraut:
mailto nsb jxr -s "Test message" -c kraut
For the convenience of users accustomed to mail readers in
which names are separated by commas, you may optionally fol-
low each address with a comma, but this is not required.
After these preliminaries are taken care of, you just type
in the contents of your message. Everything you type will
be included in your message UNLESS you type a line that
begins with the "~" (tilde) character. Such a line is known
as a TILDE ESCAPE, and can be used to give special commands
to the mailto program, as will be discussed shortly.
When you are done composing your message, you can cause it
to be sent to the intended recipients by simply typing the
end-of-file character, typically CONTROL-D. Depending on
your option settings, you may also be able to send the mail
by typing "." alone on a line, or by typing "~.".
That's all that you really need to know in order to send
mail with mailto. However, in order to use it to its ful-
lest, you will also want to learn about some of the tilde
escapes. In this section, we describe the most basic ones,
which the mailto program shares in common with the Berkeley
mail program. In subsequent sections, we will describe the
more interesting tilde escapes which are unique to mailto.
If anything in this section seems cryptic, it might be help-
ful to consult the man page for the mail(1) program, since
the user interfaces are very similar.
Any line that starts with a tilde is a tilde escape. The
second character on the line -- the one that follows the
tilde -- is then interpreted as a special command to the
mailto program. The simple tilde escapes that mailto and
mail have in common are as follows:
~? Show help on tilde escapes
~! Shell escape (e.g. "~! ls")
~~ Enter text line starting with a tilde. The tilde
"quotes" itself, allowing you to input a line of
text that starts with a tilde.
~. Send the mail and exit
~c Add to CC list (e.g. "~c nsb")
~d Read in the contents of "~/dead.letter"
(or a named file, "~d filename")
~e Edit the message being composed using the
editor named by the EDITOR environment variable.
~h Edit the To, Subject, and CC headers
~p Print out the message so far
~q Quit, copying the draft to ~/dead.letter
~r Read the named text file into the message
~s Reset the subject header
~t Add to the To list
~v Edit the message being composed using the
editor named by the VISUAL environment variable
~w Write the message being composed to a named file
(e.g. "~w filename")
You can also control the behavior of the mailto program to a
limited extent by putting commands in a file in your home
directory called ".mailrc". These commands include the
ability to define aliases for commonly used mail addresses.
See the section entitled "SUMMARY OF MAILRC FUNCTIONALITY"
later in this man page.
ENHANCED FEATURES NOT FOUND IN BERKELEY
The main difference between mail and mailto is that the
latter can be used to generate enhanced mail in MIME format,
the proposed standard format for Internet multimedia mail.
However, mailto is intended to be a very simple multimedia
mail generator. There are, accordingly, lots of things it
can't do. However, it has the virtues of being extremely
simple, extremely similar to a well-known program (mail),
and highly configurable, using the "mailcap" file mechanism
to be described below.
Basically, mailto can include the following things in mail:
1. Simple formatted text, using the MIME type
"text/richtext". This allows you to add emphasis to your
message using underlining, bold text, italic (diaplsyed as
reverse video), centering, and the like.
2. Non-text data. Metamail can include pictures, sounds,
and other non-textual data in the middle of any mail mes-
sage. The mailcap configuration mechanism can even make
this process reasonably user-friendly, but a knowledgable
user can include non-textual data even in the absence of a
proper mailcap entry.
3. Text including non-ASCII characters, such as Hebrew or
Russian. Currently, mailto directly supports only the ISO-
8859-* family of character sets, which means that it does
not meet the needs of Asian users, in particular. However,
languages that can not be expressed in the ISO-8859 family
can still be included in the same way non-text data can be
included.
These three mechanisms will be discussed separately in the
three sections that follow.
ENRICHED TEXT
Mailto lets you modify the formatting of your text in a few
simple but useful ways. As with everything else, this can
be done using simple tilde escapes, as described by the fol-
lowing list:
~b Toggle bold mode (turn bold on or off)
~i Toggle italic mode (turn italic/reverse-video on or
off)
~j Alter Justification, in particular:
~jc Center subsequent text
~jl Make subsequent text flush-left
~jr Make subsequent text flush-right
~k Toggles whether or not a "blind" copy of the message
will be kept.
~n Force newline (hard line break)
~u Toggle underline mode (turn underline on or off)
~> Indent Left Margin
~< Unindent Left Margin
~<R Indent Right Margin
~>R Unindent Right Margin
~Q Toggle quotation (excerpt) mode
~z Add the contents of ~/.signature as a TEXT signature
Some of these may require a little explanation. Bold,
italic, and underline modes are toggles in the sense that
alternate uses of ~b, ~i, and ~u turn bold, italic, or
underline mode on or off. The justification, on the other
hand, simply switches between the three justification modes,
centering, left justified, and right justified.
To understand the "~n" command, it must first be noted that
rich text is automatically justified, so that the line
breaks you type have no more significance than space charac-
ters. This allows the text to be displayed more nicely on
variable-width windows. (An exception is when you type mul-
tiple blank lines, in which case the line breaks become
real.) The "~n" command may be used to foce a line break.
Remember that you can see what your mail looks like at any
time using the "~p" command.
Quotation mode, as toggled by "~Q", is useful for formatting
excerpts. If, for example, you turn on quotation mode,
insert a file, and then turn off quotation mode, the con-
tents of the file will be considered an excerpt. Most
viewers will show excerpts as indented and/or preceded with
"> " to set them apart from the rest of the text.
Finally, "~z" simply includes your text signature file, but
formats it as a "signature", which many richtext viewers
will display in a smaller font or otherwise set it off from
the rest of your message.
MULTIMEDIA OBJECT INCLUSION
The basic command for inserting multimedia objects in a
mailto message is "~*". When you type this command, you
will be give a list of options that will vary depending on
your configuration. (How to configure this list will be
described below.) For example, it might look something
like this:
Please choose which kind of data you wish to insert:
0: A raw file, possibly binary, of no particular data type.
1: Raw data from a file, with you specifying the content-
type by hand.
1: An audio clip
2: Data in 'application/andrew-inset' format
3: An X11 window image dump
4: An interactive mail-based survey
Of these options, only the first two, options 0 and 1, will
appear at all sites and in all configurations.
If you choose options 0 or 1, you will be asked for the name
of a file containing data you wish to include. (If you
enter something that starts with "|", you are including the
output of a command rather than the contents of a file.) If
you choose option 1, you will also be asked for the correct
"content-type" name that describes that type of data. The
content-type values are defined by the MIME standard, and
are typically type/subtype pairs that describe the general
data type and its specific format. For example, a picture
in GIF format has a content-type of "image/gif", and an
audio clip in basic u-law format has a content-type of
"audio/basic". For option 0, the type "application/octet-
stream" will be used. For complete documentation on the
content-type field, consult the MIME proposed standard, RFC
1341.
More commonly, however, at a well-configured site you will
not need to know anything about content-types, because you
will choose one of the non-zero options. In these cases, a
program will run that will allow you to compose data of the
given type. The user interface to this process cannot be
described here, because it will necessarily be site-
dependent, but such programs are generally designed to be
easy for novice users.
An extra mailto command that is useful for including mul-
timedia objects is the "~Z" command. This can be used to
include a multimedia signature file. The signature file
should be a complete MIME-format file, with a Content-type
header field at the top.
CONFIGURATION VIA MAILCAP FILES
NOTE: This section is intended for those who are interested
in extending the behavior of mailto to easily include new
types of mail. Users at well-administered sites are
unlikely to need to do this very often, as the site adminis-
trator will have done it for you.
For a more complete explanation of the mailcap mechanism,
consult the man page for metamail(1). Here we summarize
only those aspects of mailcap files that are relevant to
configuring the mailto program.
First of all, mailto uses a search path to find the mailcap
file(s) to consult. Unlike many path searches, mailto will
always read all the mailcap files on its path. That is, it
will keep reading mailcap files until it runs out of them,
collecting mailcap entries. The default search path is
equivalent to
$HOME/.mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap
It can be overridden by setting the MAILCAPS environment
variable. Note: mailto does not actually interpret environ-
ment variables such as $HOME or the "~" syntax in this path
search.
The syntax of a mailcap file is quite simple, at least com-
pared to termcap files. Any line that starts with "#" is a
comment. Blank lines are ignored. Otherwise, each line
defines a single mailcap entry for a single content type.
Long lines may be continued by ending them with a backslash
character, \.
Each individual mailcap entry consists of a content-type
specification, a command to be executed on reading, typi-
cally by the metamail(1) program, and (possibly) a set of
optional "flag" values. The mailto program is only
interested in mailcap entries that have either or both of
the optional "compose" or "composetyped" or "edit" flags.
The compose flag is used to tell mailto about a program that
can be used to compose data in the given format, while the
edit flag can be used to tell mailto how to edit data in the
given format. Thus, for example the following mailcap entry
describes how to compose and edit audio data:
audio/basic; showaudio %s; compose=audiocompose %s;
edit=audiocompose %s; description="An audio clip"
The "composetyped" flag is just like compose, except that
its output is assumed to be in MIME format, including at
least a content-type and also, if necessary, a content-
transfer-encoding header field. Composetyped is necessary
if variable information needs to be conveyed via parameters
in the content-type field.
The optional "description" field is used in composing the
prompt that mailto prints in response to the "~*" command.
The compose program is used to compose data in this format,
and the edit program is used to edit data in this format.
In each of these, any occurrence of "%s" will be replaced by
the name of the file to be composed or edited. If there is
no "%s" in the compose command, it is equivalent to having
"> %s" appended to the end of the compose command.
Note that the order in which things appear in mailcap files
is highly critical. The metamail program uses the first
matching mailcap entry to display data. Mailto, on the
other hand, offers the user an alternative for every mailcap
entry that has a "compose" command. However, it should be
noted that mailto will use the content-type from the mailcap
entry in composing content-type headers. Therefore, compose
and edit commands should NOT be specified on wildcard mail-
cap entries. If you have a program can display lots of dif-
ferent subtypes, you should probably make a separate entry
for displaying and for composing the basic types, e.g.:
image/*; showpicture %s
image/gif; showpicture %s; compose="xwd -frame | xwdtoppm |
ppmtogif"; description="An X11 window image dump in GIF for-
mat"
image/x-xwd; showpicture %s; compose="xwd -frame";
description="An X11 window image dump in XWD format"
For more information on the mailcap file format and syntax,
see the metamail(1) man entry.
TEXT IN NON-ASCII LANGUAGES
Mailto provides rudimentary support for the composition of
mail in non-ASCII character sets. Currently, it supports
the ISO-8859 family of character sets. These character sets
all have the nice property that they are proper supersets of
ASCII. That is, all ASCII characters are identical in all
of the ISO-8859 character sets. When you use one of these
character sets, then, you can still type all ASCII charac-
ters as normal.
By default, however, mailto assumes that you are using the
US-ASCII character set, and will not allow the inclusion of
non-ASCII characters. To tell mailto that you are using a
terminal or terminal window that supports one of the ISO-
8859 character sets, you can use the -a switch or the
MM_CHARSET environment variable. For example, typing
"mailto -a ISO-8859-8" tells mailto that your terminal
understands ISO-8859-8, the ASCII+Hebrew character set.
This is what you would use if you were on a terminal that
actually understood this character set. If you're using a
window system such as X11, you'll also need to be sure that
your terminal emulator is using the right font. Thus if you
have a font named "heb6x13", you can start a compatible
xterm and mailto to send mixed English/Hebrew mail using the
command "xterm -fn heb6x13 -e mailto -a iso-8859-8". In
general, having an installed font with the same name as the
character set is a good idea, particularly if you're using
shownonascii(1).
Once you've got mailto started up using the right character
sets, there are two ways to enter non-ASCII characters. The
first, and by far the easiest, is to use the keys as marked,
if you're on a physical terminal that uses one of these
character sets. However, if you're using a standard ASCII
keyboard, as most X11 users do, you need some other way to
enter non-ASCII characters. To permit this, mailto has an
"eight bit mode". In eight bit mode, all printable charac-
ters that you type have the eighth bit turned on, thus turn-
ing them into non-ASCII characters. You can enter eight bit
mode using the tilde escape "~+", and you can leave it using
"~-". To see the mapping from your keyboard to eight-bit-
mode characters, just give the command "~?+".
Finally, certain languages that can be expressed in the
ISO-8859 family, notably Hebrew and Arabic, go from right to
left rather than left to right. To ease the composition of
text in these languages, mailto has a "right to left" mode.
This mode is toggled on or off using the "~^" command. For
added convenience, the right-to-left mode and eight-bit-mode
can be toggled on and off together using a single command,
"~S" (Semitic mode).
COMPLETE SUMMARY OF TILDE ESCAPES
For easy reference, here is a complete summary of the tilde
escapes in the mailto program:
~? Show help on tilde escapes
~! Shell escape
~~ Enter text line starting with a tilde
~. Send the mail and exit
~/ Set maximum size before message is split into
multiple parts
~?+ Show help on extended (eight-bit) characters
~> Indent Left Margin
~< Unindent Left Margin
~<R Indent Right Margin
~>R Unindent Right Margin
~+ Enter 8-bit mode for non-ASCII characters
~- Leave 8-bit mode (return to ASCII)
~^ Toggle
~* Add non-text data (pictures, sounds, etc.) as a new
MIME part (try it!)
~b Toggle bold mode
~c Add to CC list
~d Read from dead.letter (or named file, ~d filename)
~e Edit message being composed
~h Edit the headers
~i Toggle italic mode
~j Alter Justification (~jc = center, ~jl = flushleft,
~jr = flushright.)
~n Force newline (hard line break)
~p Print out the message so far
~q Quit, copying to dead.letter
~Q Toggle quotation (excerpt) mode
~r Read the named text file into the message
~s Reset the subject
~S Toggle Semitic mode (right-to-left AND eight-bit)
~t Add to To list
~u Toggle underline mode
~v Edit using VISUAL editor
~w Write message to named file
~z Add the contents of ~/.signature as a TEXT signature.
~Z Add the contents of ~/.SIGNATURE as a NON-TEXT
(MIME-format) signature.
SUMMARY OF MAILRC FUNCTIONALITY
The .mailrc file in your home directory is used to customize
the Berkeley mail program. The mailto program is sensitive
to some, though not all, of these customizations. In par-
ticular, you can use the .mailrc file to set the following
variables (via "set variablename" or "unset variablename")
that affect mailto's behavior:
askcc -- controls whether or not you are prompted for a
CC list.
dot -- controls whether or not a period alone on a line
should be interpreted as terminating your mail
ignore -- controls whether or not interrupts are ignored
verbose -- controls the verbosity of output from
/usr/lib/sendmail
quiet -- controls the verbosity of output from the mailto
program.
keepblind -- controls whether or not a 'blind' copy of
the mail is kept.
commasonly -- controls whether or not a space character
is interpreted as separating mail addresses. By
default,
for compatibility with BSD mail, space is inter-
preted in this way,
but the commasonly option makes mailto behave more
like a modern
Internet mailer in this regard.
The other functionality implemented by the .mailrc file is
personal mail aliases. If you have a friend with a long
horrible mail address, you can put a line in your .mailrc
file that allows you to refer to him by a more friendly
name:
alias boygeorge George.Herbert.Walker.Bush%white-
house.uucp@nsf-relay.com
Mailto implements the alias feature in a manner that is com-
patible with Berkeley mail. Moreover, it also knows how to
read ".AMS_aliases" files as used by CMU's Andrew system, so
that Andrew users do not need to maintain two different
alias files in order to use both Andrew and mailto.
OTHER KNOWN DIFFERENCES FROM BERKELEY MAIL
Although this program was modelled on Berkeley mail, its
user interface is inevitably not identical with that pro-
gram. What follows is a list of major known differences,
beyond the multimedia enhancements, that might confuse users
accustomed to the Berkeley mail program:
Address separators: In Berkeley mail, addresses are
separated by spaces, which is an abomination to the mail
gods. For backward compatibility, this also works in
mailto, but right-thinking people may use commas instead.
Newline semantics: Unlike Berkeley mail, in mailto single
line breaks are generally regarded as "soft". This means
that your message may be filled and/or justified when it is
seen by the recipient. Explicit line breaks can be added
using the "~n" command. Multiple consecutive line breaks
typed by the user WILL have the desired effect. Alter-
nately, any line that starts with a space or tab character
will be preceded by a line break.
Inclusion of dead.letter files: The "~d" command is used to
include the contents of the file "dead.letter" in the
current message. Mailto's implementation of this feature
differs from Mail's in two ways: First, the message is
included as an encapsulated message rather than as plain
text. While this may sometimes be inconvenient, it allows
multimedia dead.letter files to be retrieved properly.
Second, the "~d" command in mailto can take an argument,
which is the name of a file to use instead of the default
"~/dead.letter".
Incompatibilities with Sun's version: Sun Microsystems (and
no doubt many other vendors with whom the author is less
familiar) have enhanced the Berkeley mail command in several
ways, a few of which are not compatible with mailto. In
particular, the "~b," "~i, and "~<" commands, at least, are
different in mailto than in Sun's version.
Potential for failure in ~p: In the standard Berkeley mail
program, it is inconceivable that "~p" would ever fail. In
mailto, ~p works by calling the metamail(1) program. If
metamail is not on the user's search path, ~p will not work.
Extended alias searching: The mailto program reads both the
aliases in the .mailrc file, as does Berkeley mail, and
those in the .AMS_aliases file, as used by CMU's Andrew Mes-
sage System.
Altered editing behavior: The ~e and ~v commands, which are
used to edit the message being composed, will behave dif-
ferently in mailto if the mail includes non-text portions.
In such cases, each part will be edited separately, in
sequence, which makes it impossble for the user to acciden-
tally mess up the inter-part boundaries. Moreover, if the
mailcap entry for a given data type includes an "edit"
field, the user will be given the choice of editing with the
program named there or editing with his usual (text) editor.
In most cases, this will be a choice between using a struc-
tured editor or editing the raw data stream.
Altered behavior for large messages: Mailto delivers your
message using the splitmail(1) program. This is done so
that large messages will be split into a set of smaller
parts in a MIME-compliant way, so that MIME readers can
automatically reassemble them upon receipt. By default all
messages over 100Kbytes are split, but this can be con-
trolled using the SPLITSIZE environment variable. See the
splitmail(1) man page for more information.
New -r command-line option The -r comand-line option is not
found in standard Berkeley mail.
SUMMARY OF OPTIONS
-a <charset> -- specifies an alternate character set in use.
This had better be the one your terminal is actually using.
Currently it must be in the iso-8859 character set family.
-c name -- specifies a name for the CC field. If you want
to include multiple values, you'll need to quote the name,
as in -c "name1, name2, name3"
-r message-id -- specifies a message-id to be used in con-
structing an In-Reply-To header field.
-s subject -- specifies the subject for the mail. If it
includes spaces, it will need to be surrounded by double
quotes as well.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
MAILCAPS
This variable can be used to override the default
path search for mailcap files.
PAGER If set, this variable overrides "more" as the name
of the program to run to paginate output from an
interpreter, when pagination has been requested.
MM_CHARSET
This variable can be used instead of the -a switch
to tell mailto that your terminal (or terminal emu-
lator) implements a character set other than US-
ASCII.
TERM This variable tells mailto what your terminal type
is. This is used in conjunction with the termcap(5)
facility to figure out how to do bold characters,
reverse video, underlining, or other neat stuff on
your terminal.
EDITOR This variable names the editor mailto will use when
you ask (with ~e) to edit the message you are com-
posing.
VISUAL This variable names the visual editor mailto will
use when you ask (with ~v) to edit the message you
are composing.
SEE ALSO
metamail(1), mmencode(1), richtext(1), audiocompose(1), get-
filename(1), mailto-hebrew(1), splitmail(1), shownonasci(1)
BUGS
Currently, fgets is used to get each line of input. An
intelligent replacement, in which the effects of right-to-
left mode, eight-bit-mode, and the margin- and
justification-related commands were immediately evident,
would be a big improvement.
Although this program was modelled on Berkeley mail, its
user interface is inevitably not identical with that pro-
gram. The section entitled "OTHER KNOWN DIFFERENCES FROM
BERKELEY MAIL," above, might be considered by some to be an
extension of this "BUGS" section.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1992 Bell Communications Research, Inc.
(Bellcore)
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
material for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice and this permission
notice appear in all copies, and that the name of Bellcore
not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to this
material without the specific, prior written permission of
an authorized representative of Bellcore. BELLCORE MAKES NO
REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE ACCURACY OR SUITABILITY OF THIS
MATERIAL FOR ANY PURPOSE. IT IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES.
AUTHOR
Nathaniel S. Borenstein
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