[comp.mail.mh] Novice MH questions

monkey@caen.engin.umich.edu (Xinbing Liu) (05/30/91)

I'm new to MH, so I've got some questions to ask.  I've tried reading man
pages already, but they are too brief to be useful to me now (no examples,
for one thing).

1.  What does anno do? 

2.  What does burst do?

3.  How does ali work? What does whom do?

4.  In the directory ~/Mail/inbox, all the files have message numbers as file
    names; is it possible to use senders' names as file names?

I think questions 1 -- 3 are best answered with some examples.

Thanks in advance.
--
Xinbing Liu
Ultrafast Science Lab
University of Michigan

gildea@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Stephen Gildea) (06/19/91)

    4.  In the directory ~/Mail/inbox, all the files have message
	numbers as file names; is it possible to use senders' names as
	file names?

[I'll leave 1-3 to someone else.  I'm also assuming here that
you have MH 6.7]

You are trying to use "ls" to examine your mail.  Don't.  The
details of how MH stores your mail should not concern you.  Use
the sophisticated tools of MH to examine your mail instead.

Type "scan" to see all the mail in a folder.

If you want the folder sorted by sender, type
  sortm -textfield from -limit 0
Then when you type "scan" you will see the messages in the new order.
You will need to resort whenever you add new messages to the folder.

If you want to just see the messages from some person, type
  scan `pick -from someperson`

 < Stephen
   MIT X Consortium