Grex Info Conference

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Grex Info Item 310: Getting Mail by FTP
Entered by jmrubin on Thu Jun 25 03:39:43 UTC 1998:

Since there is no working POP3 server on this system, an easy way
to read your email by telnet is to ftp it.

You use your name and password and get /var/spool/n/a/name where
/n/a/ are the first two letters of your username.

If you have a DOS/Windows system or MacOS, you probably want to
use ASCII transfer due to end of line issues. (EOL is NL on Unix,
CRNL on DOS and CR on Mac)

You can probably empty your box, but unless you're being mailbombed
or something, this is probably not a good idea due to locking
issues. (You get new mail.)

3 responses total.

#1 of 3 by scg on Thu Jun 25 06:44:15 1998:

We really want to discourage people from doing this.  If we wanted Grex to
support offline mail reading, we would run a POP3 server.

Also, getting mail via FTP is likely to cause various problems with your mail
box, due to locking issues.

#2 of 3 by srw on Sat Jun 27 05:19:35 1998:

Don't use ftp to get your mail directly out of the spool area. FTPd has 
no idea how that file is locked during mail delivery, and you may lose 
mail, or get your mail spool file corrupted.

You can log in and use a mail client to transfer the contents of the 
mail spool to a file in your home directory. Then you can ftp that back 
to your local machine to read it there, if you must. It's probably worth 
your time to screen out any junk, and delete it when you do this. It 
doesn't take long now that Grex runs at a reasonable speed.

#3 of 3 by raven on Wed Oct 25 21:36:12 2000:

SAo is there anyway to ftp my mbox back to my linux box then delete my mbox
here to save grex some space?

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