Assignment 6

Questions from the reading assignment:

1. What are the protocols used in Internet e-mail and what is their purpose?
   
   
2. What is a blind carbon copy?
   
   
3. Is it possible for test@194.64.24.233 to be a valid e-mail address? Why or why not?
   
   
4. What is a host name?
   
   
5. E-mail travels across the Internet in small clusters (T/F).
   
   
6. What is a distribution list?
   
   
7. Describe the purpose of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).
   
   
8. What is the difference between using a local e-mail client program, and using pine on saclink or gaia?
   
   
9. Is our class mailing list moderated or unmoderated?
   
   
10. How are attached files in e-mail messages sent?
    
    

Using your gaia e-mail account

You already have an address on gaia, whether you are currently using it or not. Your e-mail address is cs008sXX@gaia.ecs.csus.edu where the XX represents the number in your account name.

Log in to gaia now, and at the shell prompt, type pine. Pine is a menu-driven e-mail client that has all the features you would expect. See appendix F for more information on using Pine. It happens to be the same e-mail client you have on saclink, so some of you might already have used it.

Gaia also happens to be running a mail server, hence the gaia in our e-mail addresses. That program is called sendmail. Sendmail is an SMTP application that accepts mail messages from local users (like you are right now), as well as from other mail servers (like your ISP's mail server for example).

Since you are a user on gaia, you can also use sendmail directly, bypassing the client software such as pine (although you lose the benefits of the client). Create a new text file by typing echo "Hi Scott" > mailtext. If you now do a directory listing, you should see a new file called mailtext. To view the file, type more mailtext or cat mailtext. The contents of the file should be the words in quotes from your echo command. The > symbol is the redirection symbol. Instead of echoing the text to the console (the default output), it was redirected to a file called mailtext.

11. Now send that file to me by using sendmail:
    
    cat mailtext | /usr/sbin/sendmail owens@gaia.ecs.csus.edu

You won't see any confirmation when the command is done, it just returns you to the shell prompt. In that last command string, cat is another command to print a file to the screen, except that you used the vertical pipe symbol to send the output to the sendmail program (note the absolute path), whose argument was an e-mail address.

Now repeat that last command, but replace my e-mail address with the address of one of your accounts (whether it be saclink or some other ISP)

Get your new messages, and look for the one you just sent from gaia using sendmail directly.

12. What do the headers of this message tell you (what are the from and to addresses)?
    
    

Compose a new message in your regular mail software, and address it to your class gaia account. After you send it, go back to your shell prompt on gaia.

On gaia, you have a mailbox folder in /var/mail/[username]. So if your account is cs008s01, then your mailbox is /var/mail/cs008s01, and you can view it with the command more /var/mail/cs008s01. Do this for your account, and find the message that you sent from your other mail address. Take a look at the header information in the message. Each server that handled the message is listed in these headers.

13. List a couple of the servers that exchanged your e-mail message?
    
    

You can now exit from gaia.

Almost all e-mail client packages allow you to make attachments to your messages. Some of you might already be doing this to send me your lab answers.

14. Using any e-mail client you wish, send me the answers to this assignment as an attachment. I would like the attachment in MIME format (not UUE, not anything else).