response 1 of 69:

Nov 26 02:40 UTC 1993

There are all sorts of ways to accomplish this.  What are you using as a
mail program?  If it's elm, there are provisions for setting up a filter
to take various actions on received mail - including junking it conditionally.
(Someone who's actually *used* this had better provide the details - but
you *could* also read the doc, which is the man page and files under
/usr/local/lib/elm.)  I presume pine provides similar functionality.
The absolute worst case is that you write a script to copy your in box
to another file, stripping out unwanted messages - and then overwrite your
in box with nothing or otherwise kill its contents - and read the resulting
file with whatever tool you choose.  (Your in box is a file whose name is
your login ID, located in /usr/spool/mail.  You don't want to actually
*delete* this file, BTW.)

response 3 of 69:

Nov 26 15:00 UTC 1993

You don't need to use Elm as your mail program to use the Elm mail
filter, which is a separate program.  Pretending for the moment that
you wanted to delete all the mail I sent to you, you would need
a .forward file that contained:

        "| /usr/local/bin/filter -o /dev/console"

(Include the quotation marks, they're important!)  Then, you would
create a directory .elm, and within that directory, you'd want a
file named filter-rules that said:

        if (from = "robh") then delete

Then, I could send you mail all the live-long day, and you'd never
get any of it.  For multiple users you don't want to get mail from,
just put additional lines in .elm/filter-rules.  If you need help setting
it up, let me know.

response 5 of 69:

Nov 26 16:08 UTC 1993

Thanks for the info.  I've just filtered out four annoying people.

response 7 of 69:

Nov 26 22:23 UTC 1993

Re #4 - Yup, they go into your regular incoming mailbox.  You can
then use whatever mail program you want to read them.

Re #6 - True, but I've been using the twit filter here in PicoSpan
for several months, and it's definitely made it a nicer place to
be.  Sometimes ignorance can be bliss.

response 9 of 69:

Nov 27 01:22 UTC 1993

From a Unix prompt - "mkdir .elm" (without quotes) to create
the directory, "cd .elm" to put yourself into the directory.

response 11 of 69:

Dec 6 11:45 UTC 1993

Well, since you haven't, when the mailer lists the email, you can
always just    d #  and string out the numbers until you include
all the ones you don't want. Sure, that's manual, but it works.

response 15 of 69:

Aug 10 17:14 UTC 1994

I think the only pattern matching you can do in the ELM index is by
subject, though I could be wrong about that.

response 19 of 69:

Oct 31 13:48 UTC 1994

Um, Valerie, I know you're trying to keep it basic, but be fair.

John:
Anyone with root access is in a position to read any file on the system.
I'm in fact quite sure that we don't have anyone here with root who makes
a habit of browsing through users' unreadable files - they're all pretty
busy trying to grex on their own AFTER doing whatever staff functions have
led them to have root access!  But in general, you should never assume
that ANY file on ANY Unix system ANYWHERE is completely secure.  If
you want it unread, encrypt it - even that's not perfect, but it's as
close as you'll get short of running only your own system that you never
connect to anything else.

In particular, if you send or receive email through the net, it will have
gone through a lot of systems, sitting on various of them for various
(usually brief) periods of time, & you have no way of knowing who has
access on all those systems.  So, for example, you should never include
a credit-card number in email without encryption.  I'm told (no personal
horror story or anything) that there are people out there who like to
scan messages as they pass by just pulling out lines containing numbers
with the formats of credit-card numbers, which they can then try.

So, I'm making a somewhat technical point - but you don't say what
level of security you're worried about.  What Valerie gave you is a
basic introduction to protection against ordinary users, & that is
the most important thing, really.  But if you're (say) saving email
about how to crash Grex & then going out & trying it, some staff member
may have occasion to look at your files.  If you're (say) saving
500MB mail files, and suddenly no one else can do anything, some staff
member looking for files to clean up is very likely to look at your
file, I'd guess.  And if your mail goes through the net, there are LOTS
of people with the ability to read it.

response 21 of 69:

Nov 6 07:58 UTC 1994

agreed