... ... 1.2.3 Mail

=o= Regular Unix "Mail" and "mail" don't have an automatic
signature mechanism.  Many people who normally use a more deluxe
mail utility occasionally find themselves resorting to using one
of these, in which case all you need to know is this command:

	~r $HOME/.signature

This simply tells Mail to include the text of the your signature
file.

=o= If you use Mail on a regular basis you may want to use the
semi-automatic signature feature.  When you're done typing your
message, you append a signature with this command:

	~a

=o= In order for this to work, though, you need to set the
"sign" mail variable.  There are two ways to implement this
variable.  The first is to set it in a $HOME/.mailrc file with
a command like this:

	set sign="Jym Dyer <jym@remarque.berkeley.edu>"

If your signature is more than one line long, you can use the
C language string syntax, as in these examples:

	set sign="Jym Dyer\n<jym@remarque.berkeley.edu>"

			-or-

	set sign="Jym Dyer\
	\n<jym@remarque.berkeley.edu>"

=o= The disadvantage of doing this in your .mailrc file is
that you now have to maintain the text of your signature in
two places.  Another approach that avoids this problem is to set
"sign" as an environment variable in your shell startup script.
For a Bourne-compatible shell, this is done with this command:

	sign="`cat $HOME/.signature`" export sign

For a C-shell, do this:

	setenv sign "`cat $HOME/.signature`"