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