REVISED 10/16/95 by Meg Ropp and 4/15/96 by Mark Gillingham
Eudora is an e-mail "client," a software interface that lets you use your Pilot account to exchange electronic messages and documents efficiently and conveniently. Your e-mail is actually processed and stored by the Pilot computers on campus, but you can take your disk "mailbox" with you because it contains all of your personal e-mail settings. You can use your mailbox-on-a-disk with any Macintosh which has the Eudora software loaded onto its hard drive (all the Mac labs on camus have Eudora and you can obtain the free version of Eudora for Macintosh from the Technology Exploration Center -133 Erickson Hall or at ftp.qualcomm.com by anonymous ftp.). Another advantage to Eudora Student Mailbox is that your disk will also include your list of "Nicknames" for people with whom you exchange mail frequently. The most important reason to use Euudora is that you can read and write e-mail messages when you are not connected to Pilot by campus ethernet or from a modem. This means that you can work with e-mail where ever you have a computer (e.g., home, friends house, school). Follow the directions below to get the Eudora Student Mailbox on your disk.
You can create a file of "nicknames" for the people with whom you frequently exchange e-mail. One hint is to create your nicknames by entering a person's last name first and then putting their first name after that without any spaces so that your list will be alphabetized. You can also create a nickname that will send mail to a group of people. For instance, I made a nickname for the 3rd year CEPSE students who are studying for comps and it has about 11 people on it. I called it "CompStudy" and then I entered everyone's e-mail address in the box separated by commas. You can create nicknames by pulling down the "Window" menu in Eudora and selecting "Nicknames" and then selecting "New." You will see a dialog box which looks like the one below. Enter the information and decide whether you want to put the nickname on the recipient list which makes it easy to send mail to people in your list (I would recommend that you check this option!) Now click on "OK"
The next dialog box will ask for the complete e-mail addresses of the person or group that you want to go with the nickname (e.g. deweyjoh@pilot.msu.edu). Once you have entered the information in a dialog box, you can click on the "To" button and Eudora will start a new message to that person. Or, you can click the mouse once in the small box in the upper left-hand corner of the window and you will get a dialog box which asks you to save changes to the nicknames - which you usually want to do!
Signing your messages is considered a courtesey and something you will want to do right away. Pull down the "Window" menu and select "Signature." Insert any information you want to have included with your outgoing messages in place of the default settings. Click on the box in the upper left-hand corner of the window to close it and your signature will be saved.
Pull down the "Message" menu and you have several choices. You can choose "New Message" which will bring up a new message window and ask you to fill in the person's e-mail address or you can choose "New Message To" and get the pop-down menu which should have all the nicknames you put on your recipient list (very convenient). Once you get the address information entered you will need to write a short subject line that describes the heart of your message. Then you can click the mouse once below the dotted line and begin typing when you see the blinking I-beam cursor. When you are finished, click on the "Queue" button and this will put your message "in line" to be sent by Eudora. When you are finished lining up messages, you can pull down the "File" menu and select Send Queued Messages Now". Look at the example below.
Pull down the "File" menu and select "Check Mail." You will then get a dialog box that asks you for your pilot password. Enter the password and all of the mail that has been stored on the Pilot computer will be downloaded to the "In" mailbox on your disk. Since you may have important messages you want to keep, it is important to keep an up-to-date backup copy of your Eudora Student Mailbox!
When people send you e-mail, you may want to "bounce" a reply back to them. All you have to do is choose "Reply" from the Message pull down menu an you can cut an paste portions of their message you want to keep or delete from your reply and type just as if you were using a word processor. You may want to forward an interesting message to someone else by choosing the "Forward" or "Forward To" options from the "Message" Menu. These are all options you will use as you become more familiar with using Eudora.
Sometimes, you will want to send a paper you have been working on or another document by e-mail. For instance, I send many things that I have created in Word or Claris Works to other people so that they can read them. Eudora allows you to send documents in their original form to other people. It is important to check that the person on the receiving end of the document has the same software program that you used to create it - I often save my Claris Works document as Word 5.1 or WordPerfect or MS Word PC or several others depending on what the other person prefers to use . If you are not sure, you can "Save As" "text" and it is likely that the person on the other end will be able to read it - without any special formatting that you may have done. To send an attachment, begin a new message to someone and then select "Attach Document" from the "Message" menu. Eudora will ask you where that document is (I usually have mine on my disk) and you need to browse until you select it. Sending attachments is might be confusing the first time around so you may want to check the sources I've listed below or ask a TEC Mentor for additional information!
After you call up the Ph option under Window on the Eudora menubar:
Ph gives info from the on-line Faculty/STaff directory (which is not always up to date!). "Finger" will let you get info about any person (use their last name) on any computer you know the name of; i.e., you know that MSU's main computer is "msu.edu" so if you want to see if a person has an account on that computer, you type their last name @msu.edu (as in "smith@msu.edu") and press the finger button. Bingo, you get all the info the computer has on anyone with the last name of Smith. If you want to see if someone has a PILOT account, type their last name @pilot.msu.edu and hit FINGER.
You can get help learning how to use different features of Eudora from several good sources. The sources I am listing here can be found on the World Wide Web by using a browser (e.g. Netscape). Open Netscape and click on the "Open" button or choose "Open Location" from the "File" menu. Then type in the following "URL's" or addresses