You can send and receive both personal mail and bulletins on CLX quite easily. Anybody may read ANY mail on the cluster, there is no personal mail in CLX.
To list mail you would use the DIRECTORY command. On its own, this command will output the last five messages received by the node. As with other commands you can display more by specifying a number with the command.
Example:
directory
directory/10
Of course most of the time you will only want to list new mail sent to you personally since your last login. However you might also like to check for general mail received by the node or occasionally check for mail to or from a particular callsign. In fact if there is new mail for you, CLX will tell you when you login. You will also be informed if new mail arrives for you during the time you are logged in. Mail is not only sent to callsigns though. Mail can also be sent to subjects like "all" or "local" or "dx" etc. You can treat these bulletins in the same way as personal mail with the directory command.
Examples:
directory/new
directory/own
directory/own/10
directory g0ylm
directory/10 g0ylm
directory all
There may be times when you want to check if mail you have sent to someone at another node in the network has been delivered. This can be done easily and you can even delete mail waiting to be forwarded to another node if you decide not to send it after all.
Examples:
directory/node
directory/node <nodecall>
The first example would list all messages sent by you in the forwarding queue, regardless of node identity. The second example is node specific. You could now delete the message(s) with the DELETE command.
There is a further option to the DIRECTORY command that is used to list bulletins in the bulletin area. You can read more about this in the section about the bulletin area.
The output of the DIRECTORY command could be something like this.
Msg. Size To From Date Time Title 164 1 145 gb7mbc gw7gwm 19-Feb-1998 0148Z Link? 165 1 303 all g4pdq 18-Feb-1998 1332Z 9M0C logs 166 2 464 all gm4uzy 18-Feb-1998 1017Z Island of 167 9 448 local g0vgs 19-Feb-1998 0738Z IOM link 175-1 351 g0vgs g4afr 27-Feb-1998 2012Z HALLO
Most of the above is self-explanatory but the first column seems to cause some confusion. Basically, the first number is the message number, for example 164. The number following it is the amount of times the message has been read. For example, message 167 has been read 9 times. Message 175 in our example has only been read once but the - sign between the two sets of numbers means that it has been read by the person it was sent to, in this case g0vgs.
Reading a message is as simple as typing read, followed by the message number that you wish to read.
Example:
read 25
will read message number 25. However the mail will be displayed in it's entirety unless you specify a page length. You can set your page length to any number you like and when the message reaches that number of lines you will get a prompt telling you to press <return> when ready.
Example:
set/page 20
Sending mail is slightly different to the way mail is sent on a standard BBS in that the subject is included on the same line as the command and destination address. Doing things this way can save time and bandwidth on slow links.
Example:
send m0azm Sked on wednesday
This would send a message to M0AZM with the subject "Sked on wednesday". The program will now prompt you for a message. You complete your message by typing control-Z or /exit on a new line. If you have set an exit string, you can use that also, (see CLX user commands). Bulletin addresses are accepted too, so you can mail to "all" or "debate" or any address you can think of! Remember that any mail you send may be passed to all other connected nodes but will not be forwarded to the standard BBS system. Should you decide to abort the message during typing, you can do so by typing control-Y or /abort.
Whilst you are typing mail, you will find that the DX continues to come in. This can be disconcerting unless you can pretype the message. To overcome this problem you can use the SHOW/NODX_ANNOUNCE command, (see CLX user commands).
If mail is addressed to you or to a bulletin address, you can use the REPLY command to reply to it. Using this command, the subject will be automatically set for you as ">: subject", whatever the subject was. You can also reply and delete the original message in one command.
Examples:
reply 25
reply/delete 25
You can only delete messages sent to or received by yourself. Bulletins are dealt with automatically or by the sysop.
Distribution lists can be set up by the sysop so that mail can be sent to certain people by just mailing to the list. For example, your sysop could set up a distribution list with a title of "CWDX" and add users to the list. Let us say that 4 users are added, G3IZD, G3KKJ, G4AFR and G0YLM. Mail sent to CWDX would be sent individually to these 4 users. Of course, the usual commands DIRECTORY, SEND etc work here too. Users can be added to or removed from the list by the sysop at any time. You can check what lists are available and also who belongs to a list easily.
Examples:
show/distro
show/distro CWDX
The first example will list all the currently available lists, while the second will show the members of the list CWDX.