How do I send email attachments on Athena?

You can easily send attachments with Evolution or Pine. Evolution is the best choice for a graphical login session (ie: sitting at an actual workstation), and Pine is the best choice when connecting to Athena remotely.

Graphical login session

For a graphical login or X11 session, we recommend the Evolution email client. This client is run by default if you click the "Mail" button in the panel at the bottom of the screen.

From the "Actions" menu, choose "Compose New Message". Fill in the To, Subject, and Body of the message as normal. Then, from the "Insert" menu, choose "Attachment...", and select the file(s) to attach.

Command-line or tty session

From the command line, we recommend the use of the pine email client. To run pine, type "pine" at the athena% prompt.

Note: If this is your first time using pine, you will see a welcome message. Press "E" to exit the welcome screen.

At the pine's main menu, press "C" to compose a message. After filling out the "To" field, move the cursor down to the "Attchment" field. With the cursors in that field, press Ctrl-J to attach a file. Pine will prompt you for the full path of the file to attach (ie: /mit/joeuser/Images/picture.jpg). After you enter the file name, it will prompt you for an "Attachment comment". This can be any short text string (ie: "A picture of my family"), and it is used by certain email clients when the attachment cannot be displayed or for people with different usability requirements (ie: braille terminals or screen readers).

You can then move the cursor to the "Message Text" portion of the screen, type your message, and press Ctrl-X to send it.