Warning about the mail tool ELM

ELM is a nice program to handle mail. In particular, you can save messages with quick key-strokes into files named by the sender's email name. Also on-screen help just by typing ? in front of commands.

BUT if you fire it up and use it for a while you will one day (when you desperately need it) find that it HAS NOT BEEN SAVING YOUR OUTGOING MESSAGES!!

I guess this is some programmers revenge on us unwashed. There are a number of such revenges loaded into unix commands. The trick is to have an invisible file that contains your "preferences" and then to give defaults that no one with an IQ of 50 would have wanted.

When you first type 'elm' it creates an empty directory called '.elm' and looks in this directory for a file 'elmrc' (which isn't there or if it's there, it's empty). You need to have a line

copy = ON

to save a copy of all outbound messages. These go into a directory in your home directory called 'Mail' and the messages are concatonated to a file called 'sent.'

Enjoy