You can send and receive both personal mail and bulletins with DXSpider quite easily.
The "directory" command
To list mail you would use the DIRECTORY command. On its own, this command will output the last ten messages received by the node, either to or from yourself or bulletins such as "DX" and "ALL". As with other commands you can display more by specifying a number with the command. You should be aware that Spider will accept these commands by separating with either a slash or a space, so dir new and dir/new work in the same way.
Example:
directory directory/20 directory 20
Of course most of the time you will only want to list new mail sent to you personally since your last login. However you might also like to check for general mail received by the node. In fact if there is new mail for you, the cluster will tell you when you login. You will also be informed if new mail arrives for you during the time you are logged in. Mail is not only sent to callsigns though. Mail can also be sent to subjects like "all" or "local" or "dx" etc. You can treat these bulletins in the same way as personal mail with the directory command.
Examples:
directory/new directory/own directory/own/10 directory/all directory/from <call>
The last option will only show mail from a callsign if it was sent to you personally or was sent as a bulletin. There are some additional commands and these can be found in the DXSpider Command Reference section.
Reading mail
The output of the DIRECTORY command could be something like this.
dir 20735 2 ALL GW7SMV 21-Feb 1204Z REC 9E1S QSL TDY 50Mhz.... 20823 308 UK G0HDB 22-Feb 2334Z Help - which district code? 20824 105 ALL W9AE 23-Feb 0349Z S0NY QSL address? 20825 2 UK G0LRJ 23-Feb 0806Z QSL REC LZ2CJ/1.CARD NO-750. 20858 2 ALL GW7SMV 24-Feb 0905Z REC S92DX QSL CARD TDY 50Mhz 20921 200 ALL GM4FDM 27-Feb 2203Z Trip to VP8 20949 375 ALL K0MN 27-Feb 0428Z ST0P cards are gd @ ARRL 20950 2 UK G0LRJ 28-Feb 0835Z QSL REC SV9/IZ0CKJ/P EU-187. 20987 569 ALL GD0TEP 1-Mar 1733Z Portable contests 21076 2 ALL G4AFJ 3-Mar 1743Z kh6nd/kh5 qsl received 21184-p 599 GW4HAT G0VGS 4-Mar 1518Z Re: Time
The first column is the actual message number. If the message is a personal one to you, you will see a letter 'p' after this number. If the message has been read, there will be a '-' between the message number and the 'p'. This only works for personal messages. The next column shows the file size of the message. The third column shows the address the message was sent to and the next column shows who sent it. The rest is fairly self-explanatory.
Reading a message is as simple as typing read, followed by the message number that you wish to read.
Example:
read 25
will read message number 25. However the mail will be displayed in it's entirety unless you specify a page length. You can set your page length to any number you like and when the message reaches that number of lines you will get a prompt giving you options.
Example:
set/page 20
Sending mail
Sending mail is done in the time honoured way. First you specify a recipient for the message, then you will be prompted for a subject. Once you have done this you will be asked to type your message. Please remember that there is no automatic word wrap, so unless you are using a client that wraps lines automatically, remember to hit return at the end of each line.
Example:
send m0azm Enter Subject (30 characters): See you Thursday Enter Message /EX to send or /ABORT to exit Hi Ian, Just a quick note to say that I can make Thursday after all. The appointment I had has cancelled so we are go! Cheers Ian
At this point you can either hit return and enter /ex to send the message or use /abort at any time to abort it. You can now display the message in the normal way. There are several send options and these are listed in the Command Set section. These include sending mail to several recipients and asking for a return receipt.
Replying to mail
If mail is addressed to you or to a bulletin address, you can use the REPLY command to reply to it. Using this command, the subject will be automatically set for you as "Re: subject", whatever the subject was.
Example:
reply 2500
Deleting mail
To delete a message, you use the delete command. You can only delete messages sent to or received by yourself. Bulletins are dealt with automatically or by the sysop.