I need someone with patience.....
I come from the DOS world and have, for the past year, been working in Unix.
I've elevated myself to the point of being the most knowledgable person on
staff when it comes to the operations of our internet site. This includes
email, web server, ftp, firewall, routers, and gcc. awk, perl, and cgi are
on my list to figure out. (Tomorrow?!?!?) All of this running on a single
Sun Sparc-20 using what is suppose to be Solarus 2.5, even though the login
prompt says "System V Release 4.0". (I wonder if I've sufficiently
expressed my astronomical level of expertise, yet...)
Anyway, I've been tasked to figure out a way of "filtering" the incoming
email for "trigger phrases" and if found, generate an email response back to
the originator AND forward the original message to a "special" mailbox that
can then be checked to ensure all questions/requests have been handled. I'm
not even going to worry about multiple requests in a single message, yet.
What I've done to this point is:
1. (I THINK) I have procmail compiled and installed in the right directories
2. Read everything I could find, even if I didn't understand exactally
what it meant.
3. Subscribed to, and have been reading messages of, this mail-list for
two or three weeks.
I now have a DEEP appriciation of why the sendmail book is so thick from
O'Reilly & Associates. I also have a worry about trying to set up any of
this because it's going to be running on a machine that I think is already
over burdened and VERY probably not configured correctly.
Now comes the whole point to my message to the group. (And thanks for
reading this far!) I'd like someone to "volunteer" to mentor to me. I
don't want to burden the whole group with what I'm sure are going to be VERY
stupid questions like "Do I have to have a user defined for every mailbox
that I direct email to? And if not, how do I configure the email client
(Eudora) to retrieve email without a valid login/password?" (Told you they
would be stupid.)
I'm learning all this as part of my self-directed re-training so I'll be
looking for reasons why instead of "Type this in..." kind of help. I'm a
firm believer that you'll not get anything without first asking so there's
my request. Obviously, email responses are highly encouraged, but Seattle
area meetings/phone calls are very well received. :-)
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Bob Woodward