Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [95]
If your Away message is set through the idle timer just described, Gaim automatically replaces it with an Available message when you move the mouse or start typing again. If you have set an Away message explicitly, you need to explicitly indicate when you've returned by choosing Tools → Away → Back. The Available message shown when you're at your terminal can be set through Tools → Account Actions → Set Available message.
Gaim automatically checks your spelling and underlines misspelled words as you type. Because a rebellious air of reckless informality has always hung over instant messaging, it strikes us as the tool where accurate spelling is least important. The feature works quite well and adapts to the user's locale (that is, the language and nationality you chose when installing your distribution), but it can be turned off in the Message Text box under Preferences if you like.
A more useful feature for busy and bumbling typists is text replacement. This is provided as one of the many plug-ins you can enable in the Preferences dialog. Click on Plugins and enable "Text replacement." Then type in abbreviations you'd like to use for common phrases. For instance, one author of this book has defined the string newrl to expand to Running Linux, 5th Edition to make it easy to refer to that book. You must enter the string as a separate word for Gaim to recognize and expand it.
We described earlier how to let buddies know your changes in presence. Gaim can also display their presence, but by default it does not pop up a message (as some IM clients do) to let you know every time a buddy has arrived or left. You can add this feature through the guifications plug-in. Download it from http://guifications.sourceforge.net, install it, and enable it in the Preferences dialog box under Plugins.
Even without the guifications feature, you have fine-grained control over presence notifications: you can tell Gaim to notify you when a particular buddy has logged in, logged out, gone idle, returned, and so forth. Thus, you may choose on a particular day to be told when somebody logs in or returns, because you're in a hurry to reach him to discuss a particular task. The mechanism for doing all this is called a buddy pounce .
To use this feature, choose Tools → Buddy Pounce → New Buddy Pounce. In the dialog that appears, you can indicate exactly whom you want to track, what changes in presence you want to be notified about, and how you want to be notified. The buddy is not informed of any of this snooping unless you choose "Send a message." You could use that feature to have a box such as "Please call home right away" appear on the buddy's screen at the moment his or her presence changes.
Chapter 6. Electronic Mail Clients
Modern email readers have graphical interfaces and tend to offer similar features in a similar manner. In addition to delivering your electronic mail, most allow you to maintain contact lists and many include calendars. Email readers usually also let you read newsgroups, which are one of the oldest features in computer networking and still offer valuable communities and quick sources of information (if you can find groups untainted by scads of unsolicited commercial postings).
One of the most popular email readers and contact managers, Evolution, was described in Chapter 3. In this chapter, we show you some interesting ways to use other graphical email readers productively, and give you the background you need to carry out some more advanced tasks, such as delivering mail from a server to a local system using fetchmail, and protecting your mail with encryption.
Linux supports older, text-based tools for doing these things too. Elm and Pine are fast text-based