Re: checking for new mail

[Julio Polo <julio@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>]

> > We're planing to use zmailer on our Suns running SunOS 4.1.3 and
> > Solaris 2.3 to deliver mail to the user's home directory (into a file
> > called Inbox) instead of the usual /var/spool/mail (or /var/mail).  Has
> > anyone else run zmailer on a UNIX machine and delivered mail to users'
> > home directories?  If so, I'd like to know how you have changed your
> > login and finger programs so that they check for new mail in the new
> > location.  This is what I mean:
> 
> 	Yeah, I know what you mean, but do you know how many programs
> 	will need to be changed ?
> 		(/bin/mail, /usr/ucb/mail, elm, pine, imapd, emacs, popd,
> 		 /usr/ucb/finger ... plus the mailer,  to name a few...)

We had the sources to imapd and popd and only a few changes were required
to make them work with ~/Inbox.

As for mail reading/sending program programs, we plan to write
"wrappers" that change the MAIL environment variable to ~/Inbox.
The wrapper is written in C, and is basically a call to execv()
to execute the program we're "wrapping" after modifying a few things,
or sometimes, a call to a modified version of the program.  We tried
writing the wrappers as a C-shell script but sometimes the terminal
settings were messed up if the user suspended the process.

biff will be replaced by something else that allows the user to
specify the mailbox (such as elm's newmail, xbiff)

> 	It MIGHT be doable, if you replace  /var/spool/mail  with an
> 	automount map which maps
> 		/var/spool/mail/$USER
> 	and	/var/spool/mail/$USER.lock
> 
> 	to:
> 		$HOME/Inbox
> 	and	$HOME/Inbox.lock
> 
> 	See what locking mechanisms are used, SVR4 (Solaris) uses ".lock".

Yes, we thought about that too, but it just seemed too messy, even more
so when locking is involved.

Anybody out there done this?  Are we really the first ones to deliver to
home directories?

        Julio Polo
        University of Hawaii Computing Center
        2565 The Mall, Keller Hall
        Honolulu, HI 96822
 
        (808) 956-2405
        julio@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu