i would like to if there is a recommended limit on how much email i can
receive here.  also i want to know if i can set up a program to  handle
mail and take actions based on this even if i an not logged in.
thanks in advance,
nathan

need help with mail

18 responses total.

I'll start an answer, but there's a *lot* that could be said, & your
question invites it all.  (Oh, yes, first: no *official* limit or anything,
but if you're anticipating huge amounts of mail, it would be nice to find
out if you can find a better way than Grex's rather limited throughput.
You might want to check with meg; I think she still handles mail for quite
a few sites, & may be able to suggest alternatives.)

You can do lots of things to handle mail.  You can set up a .forward file
to forward it elsewhere, including saving a copy in your in box here &
also forwarding it elsewhere.  ***PLEASE*** don't do this unless you are
going to check in here & clear out your in box on a reasonably regular
basis - the fs holding in boxes is chronically short on free space these
days.

There's the vacation program, which will send some kind of programmed
reply to the senders of your mail.  I've never used it, but I think it
has some flexibility, & I'm told it's very easy to use - but it's intended
for that purpose, not as a general-purpose mail-handler or anything.

One part of elm (a mailer on this system) is a program called filter.  It
lets you specify actions (save, forward, throw away) based on criteria
such as sender.  Again, I've never used it, so I won't go into details,
but some doc should be around somewhere, and others here use it.  You might
try robh - I think he's answered filter questions around this conference.

Hope that helps you find out what you want to know.

procmail is reputed to do many things in the way of filtering and
organiziing mail.  I haven't tried it yet, though.

thanks for the info all.  now where can i get these programs and some docs?
also, i got a letter from robh, but it said the spool was full and
apparently bounced my reply.  basically i wanted the manual to the filter
program.  feel free to hunt through my tree to find it, it won't be hard
i think it is about the only thing other than system stuff there.  i will
try to resend later.

Well, you could try man filter or man vacation.  (I haven't actually read
the things, just saw that they're there.)  There also seems to be a man
page for procmail, but it's in /usr/local/bin instead of where the man
pages live, so man doesn't find it - unless procmail.1 is something other
than a man page.

Tell ya what, Nathan, if you want to look at the filter
files I have set up for myself, you can read any of the
following files, using more or less or filebrowse or
whatever you prefer:

        /u/robh/.forward
        /u/robh/.elm/filter-rules

And also read the man pages on filter, run the Unix
command "man filter".

Um, Rob, I don't think he *can* read your filter rules.  The permissions on
.elm don't allow people to look at files in it.  This is a Good Thing, but
if you want to publicize your rules you'll have to do something like change
the permissions or set up a copy (or a hard link) in your home dir or
something.

I already changed the perms before I entered that response.
I'm one step ahead of ya, Mr. Picky.  >8)

I'm still getting permission denied on them.

That's because of the perms on the .elm directory, Rob.

Rob, you gave *read* permission for the dir, but that's no help.  It only
allows people to get a list of names of files in the dir, but not to use
the dir in pathnames to files (not even to look at inodes, for permissions
or file times, much less contents) of the files themselves).  For that,
you have to grant execute access for .elm.  As I say, you could get around
this by putting a copy of the filter-rules file in your home dir, or making
a hard link for it there; but if you want, chmod +x .elm will also do it.

In fact, to let people read a file whose name you give them, you don't need
to grant read access to the dir at all.  Execute access will let them use
that dir in a pathname in a cat or more or cp command, but not get a list
of what files you have.  The permissions on the individual files still
determine whether others can read *them*, of course, once execute access to
the dir is granted.

Whoops!  Well, I never pretended to know EVERYTHING about Unix,
just more than the new people...  >8)

Permissions are changed again, it should work now.

I've been looking at the procmail docs and have used it a bit.  It's
a useful, flexible tool for presorting your mail.  Indeed, you can
use it to arrange that your mail is never stored in /usr/spool/mail
at all, but goes directly into a file in your home directory.  This
is something to consider on a system like Grex where /usr/spool is
crowded but /home is relatively sparse (for the time being).

On an account I have at one site, I'm using procmail to split up
incoming mail so that each message is stored in a separate file.

You can use procmail to presort mail into separate folders based on
sender, subject, or any number of combinations of conditions based
on the contents of the headers and/or bodies.

Where are the procmail docs?

I moved the manual page procmail.1 from /usr/local/bin to
/usr/local/man/man1, so "!man procmail" will now give you a
man page.

Thanks, John!

From what I have used of the program, I have found procmail to be very
reliable.  The idea of putting mail in the users directory is a good one,
but you would have to make all the mailers "know" the new "inbox".  That
would be kinda diffcult with the number of mailers around. (mh, /bin/mail,
elm, pine are just a few)

Unless you made everyone use just one mailer....  no, that would be a bad
idea.

Right, I don't think you'd want to make a system-wide change.  But
individuals who tend to receive a lot of mail could lighten the
load on /var/spool/mail by using procmail to have mail delivered
to their home directory.  (Although that may not work too well once
disk quotas are imposed.)

I tried out the    vacation  program recently, cold. vacation was
warm-n-fuzzy even thought the man pages suggest a switch be used,
don't use it. Just run    vacation   and it'll be sweet to you.
 
Nice.

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