We’ve already discussed a little bit about mail inside of Valhalla. Mail is a very important feature—it allows you to carry on discussions with other players even if you can’t get inside of Valhalla at the same time. It also allows you to take part in group discussions with a wide variety of Valhalla’s denizens.
When you come into Valhalla, you’ll be told which discussion groups have mail on them that you haven’t read. If you want to double check later, on, you can type
@rn
to see a list of all of your discussion groups that have unread mail on them.
After you read the first piece of mail, you can simply type
@next on me
or
@next on discussion-group
to see the next message.
You can delete mail that you no longer need by typing
@rmm number on me
Your message numbers will continue to climb, however. You can reset the message numbers back to one with
@renumber
There are a number of things that the mail agent assumes about you, and you can change these assumptions. Type help @mail-option for more information.
Normally, mail assumes that you’re talking about yourself. If you type @next, it’ll assume you mean @next on me. If you set mail to be sticky, it’ll assume you meant whatever ‘mail box’ you used last time. If the last thing you typed was @next on *Life, another @next will also deal with *Life. Use
@mail-option +sticky
to make your mail verbs sticky, and
@mail-option -sticky
to ‘unstick’ your mail verbs.
Many people like to get all of their mail in one place. You can have your Valhalla mail forwarded to another Internet address (including valhalla.hoboes.com if you have an address there) by setting your netmail mail-option:
@mail-option +netmail
You can build your own discussion group. The ‘parent’ discussion group is $mail_recipient. Here’s a basic, general access discussion group:
@create $mail-recipient named discussion-group-name
Your discussion group name cannot have any spaces in it.
@set discussion-group-name.readers to 1
By setting this property to 1, you’re giving everybody in Valhalla access to the group.
@describe discussion-group-name as "Description of discussion group
@move discussion-group-name to $mail_agent
Until you move the discussion group into the mail agent, it doesn’t matter that anyone else can take part in it, because they can’t see it, and won’t know it exists. Once it’s inside the mail agent, anyone can @subscribe to your discussion group. Your group will show up when anyone else in Valhalla lists discussion groups with the @unsubscribed verb.
A moderated group is one that can be read but not sent to. You might, for example, create a newspaper as a discussion group. Journalists would send their articles to you (the editor), and you would edit them and send them to the group, at which time all the readers will see it. To make a group moderated, set the ??? property to the names of the people who will be allowed to send to the group. Only these people can send.
@set #discussion-id to {#player_1-id,#player_2-id,...,#player_n-id}
You need to use the object identifier numbers because Valhalla can’t ‘see’ either the discussion group or the players.
You can make a group private by telling it exactly which people are allowed to read it. Instead of setting .readers to 1, set it to a list of the players who will be allowed to read it:
@set #discussion-id to {#player_1-id,#player_2-id,...,#player_n-id}
The discussion group will not allow anyone who is not on the list to join the discussion.