Everybody who is registered with the Challenge receives an e-mail account on the machine mode. Important mail is sent to you by the Challenge staff via this e-mail address throughout the year.

A Challenge e-mail address will look similar to ch099abc@mode.lanl.k12.nm.us. The "ch" stands for "Challenge", the "099" is your team number, and the "abc" is your initials. Note, if we don't know your middle initial, an "x" will be placed in that location.

To read/send e-mail from your account on mode, you must first login to mode using your Challenge login name and password. Next, start up the mail utility know as Pine by typing "pine" (no quotes) at the mode prompt.

Pine is relatively easy to use for a unix/linux application. It is menu driven, and fairly self-explanatory to use. In fact, the editor used to write messages in Pine is the "pico" editor so many of you are familiar with. Note that Pico stands for PIne COmposer.

Forwarding your Challenge E-mail: Many of our Challenge participants already have existing e-mail accounts elsewhere that they readily use. You may forward all of the e-mail that is sent to your Challenge account to this other account. This way, you will not have to check two different e-mail accounts! To establish this feature, do the following:

• In your home directory, use the text editor Pico to create a file named ".forward" (no quotes) by typing the following at the mode prompt:

  pico .forward

• Now, on the first line, enter your primary e-mail address. For example:

  user@host.com

  This will redirect e-mail directed towards your Challenge address to the "user@host.com" address.

• If you wish to keep a copy of the e-mail on your Challenge account as well, type the following on the second line of the ".forward" file:

  \ch099abc

  Where "ch099abc" is the login name you use to access the machine mode.

• Save your changes and quit pico.

• At the mode prompt type

  more .forward

  to make sure you have entered the information correctly. If not, type "pico .forward" (no quotes) and make the necessary changes.

• Test out the changes you have made by e-mailing yourself a message to your Challenge account. Make sure the message has been redirected to your primary address, and that a copy has also been left on your mode account if you have set up the ".forward" file to do so.