Type:

mail person@example.com

and follow the prompts. type
.

all by itself to finish.
Wether the recipient gets the message depends a lot on your ISP's outgoing mail policies.

I just tried sending a message to my own gmail account. I typed my email address, pressed return, and got the subject line, entered 'test' as subject, pressed return, and entered some more text, then pressed return again, then the . it said "EOT" and the terminal prompt. But there's nothing inside my gmail inbox.

Do I have to configure something else? And why is it so complicated? The book I have doesn't explain this. Are there any other books on UNIX that I could get/you recommend? I'm currently reading "Learning the bash shell' by Newham & Rosenblatt, published by O'Reilly.

The last sentence of my previous post is your answer. Many ISPs block mail servers other than their own, preventing bot-spam but also preventing you sending out mail.

On the other end, receiving mail servers sometimes block mail from servers that don't have a vaild reverse DNS record (your home machine will definitely not have a valid record).

I can't send mail from my home machine either, but I can from my web provider's machine, same command.

see this hint it configures postfix to send mail via your isp and should work.

Straitsfan,

Well if you type "man mail" at the command prompt you'll get a nice summary.

mail -s "I'm sending you a letter" someone@example.com < letter.txt

That line tells you most of what you need to know.

You run the mail command supplying it a subject and the address you want the letter to go to and then redirect in the text.

// Tony