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sendmail

Topic 12 · 8 responses · archived october 2000
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~terry seed
This about sendmail and particularly about popmail. How do you start it, maintain it and tweak it?
~terry #1
How do you get sendmail to issue to notificationi alerts of incoming mail when you're at shell prompt? It does this on barton.spring.com but ont on our www.spring.com machine. Or is this a function of the user account?
~terry #2
Here's the party line (from the BSDI man page): Sendmail sends a message to one or more recipients, routing the message over whatever networks are necessary. Sendmail does internetwork for- warding as necessary to deliver the message to the correct place. Sendmail is not intended as a user interface routine; other programs pro- vide user-friendly front ends; sendmail is used only to deliver pre-for- matted messages. With no flags, sendmail reads its standard input up to an end-of-file or a line consisting only of a single dot and sends a copy of the message found there to all of the addresses listed. It determines the network(s) to use based on the syntax and contents of the addresses. Local addresses are looked up in a file and aliased appropriately. Aliasing can be prevented by preceding the address with a backslash. Normally the sender is not included in any alias expansions, e.g., if `john' sends to `group', and `group' includes `john' in the expansion, then the letter will not be delivered to `john'.
~terry #3
Why is it that I get email notification on barton.spring.com but not on www.spring.com. The notification pops up when I am sitting arond in a shell, like this: New mail for terry@barton.spring.com has arrived: ---- From: Domain Registration Role Account Subject: Re: [NIC-970610.13373] WEBZINE.COM The following template has been returned due to the following errors. Please review the instructions in the domain registration template available at ftp://rs.internic.net/templates/domain-template.txt. The glossary of the parser errors is available at: ...more... New mail for terry@barton.spring.com has arrived: ---- Subject: Re: 20" Monitor From: Rojo@apple.com, Laura Terry, >Also, who at Apple would be the decisionmaker on sponsoring a >community conferencing system like the Spring? barton:~ etc...
~tedchong #4
Terry, you have to run a shell that can alert you new mails or run a program in your startup file that can do the same. If you run csh or tcsh (use chsh to change), it will promopt "you have new mail(s)" when new emails arrive after a command is completed. If you like to have some parts of your new email shown, you have to put "biff y" on your .bashrc or .login or .cshrc file. Or you can use "newmail -i 90" to check for new mails every 90 secs in one of the 3 files mentioned. See "man biff" and man "newmail" for more details.
~terry #5
Yeah, I'm running bash. No reason. It's just the one of always used. What shell do you run and why?
~tedchong #6
I like tcsh, just like you like apple I like orange. Well, if you use bash, be sure to put "biff y" in youe .bashrc file.
~terry #7
Why?
~tedchong #8
putting "biff y" in your .bashrc file will notify you if new email is arriving...
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