At 9:04 AM 8/9/95, Natalie Maynor wrote:
 
>And if you don't use Elm, you can create the .elm directory and still use
>the filtering.  I use regular Unix mail (still my favorite mail program)
>but let Elm filter the mail for me.
 
        This is getting a little off topic for this list, and stands a good
chance of degenerating into a religious war, so I'll keep this short.
 
        If you're not afraid to spend about 10 minutes learning a pretty
simple scripting language, procmail is the ideal mail filtering tool for
Unix.  You can use it to select messages based on a number of criteria,
applied heirarchically if you program it that way, and either save those
messages to a mailbox, forward them to another user, or pipe them into a
program.  This last is a great way to create automagic responses to error
messages that fit certain criteria -- for example, if you receive a user
unknown message (that somehow slips through the listserv detection
mechanism) you can automagically send an unsub request to listserv.  If you
receive mail via the vacation program, you can automagically send a NOMAIL
request to listserv *and* send a note to the user telling them how to set
the MAIL when they return.  You can filter your -request mail for certain
keywords and generate appropriate responses.  And you can take all those
messages from Demon in the UK and send them to the trashcan.
 
        Procmail is available for Unix only, and can be installed with a
little bit of knowledge about how mail works on your system.  You don't
need to be the sysadmin of your system to install it, but here at NetSpace
we use it instead of the normal sendmail delivery program because it is
more efficient and does the proccessing automatically.  If you're
interested, ftp to ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de and grab a copy.   The
current version is something above 3.0.
 
Lee Silverman     [log in to unmask]      http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/
         Live each day as if your life had just begun.  --  Goethe