Mary Smith <mysweetheart0(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)com> writes:
[[Try reading the manpage.]]
All it says is "No manual entry for ...".
If procmail came with the system (that is, you didn't install it) and
the commands "man procmail" and "man procmailrc" don't give show those
manpages, then you should talk to your local sysadmin. The problem may
be as simple as a mis-set MANPATH variable, or it may be an
installation problem that they need to fix.
Anyway, you dredged up the relevant code to put into
.procmailrc, thanks. But:
[[Someone who actually uses COMSAT for something other than
simply disabling notifications will probably be able to
answer this much better.]]
Oh oh, so diddling the local value of COMSAT might cause bad
side effects that you can't warn me about because you don't
know yourself? Maybe I should not mess with that just yet.
"bad effects"? As long as you're just setting it to "on" or "off" (or
yes/no, true/false, 1/0, etc) then nothing bad is going to happen.
Hmm, in fact, as long as you don't set it to a value containing an '@',
you should be just fine.
The procmailrc(5) manpage entry says the following about the COMSAT
variable:
COMSAT Comsat(8)/biff(1) notification is on by default,
it can be turned off by setting this variable to
`no'. Alternatively the biff-service can be
customised by setting it to either `service@',
`(_at_)hostname', or `service(_at_)hostname'. When not
specified it defaults to biff(_at_)localhost(_dot_)
biff/comsat notifications are orchestrated by three programs: biff,
comsatd, and the LDA (procmail, or mail.local, or whatever your system
uses to deliver mail). Biff simply sets a flag (the u+x permission
bit) on your terminal device indicating that you're interested in
receiving the notifications. comsatd listens for UDP packets
specifying the username and position in the user's mailspool of a newly
delivered message. When comsat receives such a notification it checks
to see if the specified user is logged in, and if so, whether any of
their terminal devices have been flagged by biff. All such terminals
have written to them a notification message.
Procmail's place in this is the sending of the proper UDP packets to
comsat. By default procmail will send the messages to the comsat port
on the local host, but you can change that by setting COMSAT as
described in the manpage entry above. Thus, if mail is received on a
machine different from the one that you are normally logged into, you
can set COMSAT to "@normal-login-host" and have the messages be sent to
the comsat daemon there. At a previos job I used this to change a mail
polling program to be interrupt driven by having it listen on a UDP
socket and then telling the frontend procmail program to send comsat
messages to that alternate program/port.
BTW: can you please attribute the people you're quoting. You probably
have noticed that most people quote others by saying something like:
Joe Blow <jblow(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com> writes:
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
When someone replies to a reply the >'s just keep getting deeper, so
you can still track who said what. By beginning each line of the
quotation with a '>' the entire block sticks out much more clearly then
the [[text]] style that you appear to currently be using and that's a
Good Thing.
Philip Guenther
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