• pine 
A good text-mode mail reader. Another good and standard one is elm. Your Netscape mail will read the mail from your Internet account. pine will let you read the "local" mail, e.g. the mail your son or a cron process sends to you from a computer on your home network. The command mail could also be used for reading/composing mail, but it would be inconvenient--it is meant to be used in scripts for automation. 

• elm 
A good tex-mode mail reader. See the previous command. 

• mutt 
A really basic but extremally useful and fast mail reader. 

• mail 
A basic operating system tool for e-mail. Look at the previous commands for a better e-mail reader. mail is good if you wanted to send an e-mail from a shell script. 

• licq 
(in X term) An icq "instant messaging" client. Another good one is kxicq. Older distributions don't have an icq client installed, you have to do download one and install it. 

• talk username1 
Talk to another user currently logged on your machine (or use "talk username1@machinename" to talk to a user on a different computer) . To accept the invitation to the conversation, type the command "talk username2". If somebody is trying to talk to you and it disrupts your work, your may use the command "mesg n" to refuse accepting messages. You may want to use "who" or "rwho" to determine the users who are currently logged-in. 

• mc 
Launch the "Midnight Commander" file manager (looks like "Norton Commander" for Linux). 

• telnet server 
Connect to another machine using the TELNET protocol. Use a remote machine name or IP address. You will be prompted for your login name and password--you must have an account on the remote machine to login. Telnet will connect you to another machine and let you operate on it as if you were sitting at its keyboard (almost). Telnet is not very secure--everything you type goes in open text, even your password! 

• rlogin server 
(=remote login) Connect to another machine. The login name/password from your current session is used; if it fails you are prompted for a password. 

• rsh server 
(=remote shell) Yet another way to connect to a remote machine. The login name/password from your current session is used; if it fails you are prompted for a password. 

• ftp server 
Ftp another machine. (There is also ncftp which adds extra features and gftp for GUI .) Ftp is good for copying files to/from a remote machine. Try user "anonymous" if you don't have an account on the remote server. After connection, use "?" to see the list of available ftp commands.  The essential ftp command are: ls (see the files on the remote system), ASCII, binary (set the file transfer mode to either text or binary, important that you select the proper one ), get (copy a file from the remote system to the local system), mget (get many files at once), put (copy a file from the local system to the remote system), mput (put many files at once), bye (disconnect). For automation in a script, you may want to use ncftpput and ncftpget, for example: 
ncftpput -u my_user_name -p my_password -a remote.host.domain remote_dir *local.html 

• minicom 
Minicom program (looks like "Procomm for Linux"). 

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