# Verifying your 8.01 Fifth Week Flag E-mail

If you receive a Fifth Week Flag in 8.01, it will be electronic mail with a digital signature, and it will look something like this:

    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

    This is a sample 8.01 early warning message.  If it had been a real
    message, it would have been mailed to the student and cc:ed to the
    student's advisor and 8.01 Recitation Instructor.

    [Instructions for authenticating this message are available at
    http://web.mit.edu/acs/www/fwf/802.html]

    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
    Version: 2.6.2

    iQCVAwUBOMkdpx7siEpD8VBdAQF1RgQAlUjXGCcpZYzzMV+kpd3el5h1N6oGRzAY
    GVeBoQyP+Gh6yGuGLJdbei1MNb0wCUXLT6Nx6iQlY0WizeBFAgpJfpqn0WqW5qv/
    yNnPktNfcfice316mOemCLVDnpRDiRKQ+ehzBb+q1Btx5576aqhAaJIBZemSrYAO
    gbhRLWSrJ/0=
    =XFXq
    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

To verify that the message is valid, you may use the special "verify-message" command on Athena, as follows:

verify-message
  to check the current message if you use mh commands (`inc`, `scan`, `show`, or `xmh`, `exmh`, etc.) to read your mail
verify-message <message-number>
  to check a different message, substituting the message number for <message-number>
verify-message <file-name>
  to check a message that you've saved to a file from any mail program, substituting the file name for <file-name>

You will get a report something like this:

    Please make sure the following says the signature is good and that
    the message is addressed to you.

    Good signature from user "8.01 Course Instructors".
    Signature made 2000/03/10 16:31 GMT

    The message follows. Press ENTER to continue...

...followed by the text of the message.