File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1998/marxism-general.9801, message 239


Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 14:35:40 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re:  M-G: more about cottage mailing lists


Hans wrote:

> Then I taught emacs to check every minute if I have new mail, read it, and
> process the mailing lists without my interaction.  It was first set up
> in such a way that I had to be logged on to my account for this to
> happen (and therefore the computer in my office was logged on
> continuously), but now I am running emacs in batch mode as a cron job
> so that I do not have to be logged on.  It reads all my incoming mail,
> automatically recognizes which mail is for the mailing list, and
> forwards those mails automatically.  For debugging or so i can still
> do it in interactive mode as well.  But not every user has permissions
> to run such continuous jobs, it is perhaps more realistic to aim for
> mailing lists which forward the mail only when the host is logged on.

There is no need for these stratagems, because there already are programs
that do these things and that everybody on Unix systems is permitted to run; 
their use is part of the use of email.  You invoke these programs by
directing your mail through a mail filter.  You can either have an elm filter
or a procmail filter, and both elm and procmail are in the public domain.
The way the filters work is that when mail is delivered, the mail delivery
agent, instead of depositing mail directly in your mailbox, delivers it
according to the directions you have specified in your filter.  The directions
can be as simple or as complex as one likes: they might involve saving the
given piece of mail to a folder, deleting it, depositing it in the inbox,
forwarding it, or invoking some program to handle it.  So mail gets handled
automatically as it arrives, and then when you log on you can read it, and
do further things with it, using any mail program you like.

There are heaps of free software for Unix.  Almost everything that one uses
in one's daily use of Unix is in the public domain.


-m


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