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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: biff/comsat problem
Keywords: biff, comsat, inetd
Message-ID: <1991Feb4.230956.31416@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 91 23:09:56 GMT
References: <15767@milton.u.washington.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 22

In article <15767@milton.u.washington.edu> hg1915@milton.u.washington.edu (Helen Gottschalk) writes:
>
> I have problem to get my biff/comsat function correctly.  Everything sounds

> My guess is that no message is ever arrive in that port.  Which process
>will send message to biff port? Is local sendmail or remote sendmail or 

 'sendmail' itself has nothing to do with biff.  On a standard BSD system,
it is /bin/mail which forwards a packet to 'comsat' for the biff message.
Usually /bin/mail is used as the local mailer for delivery to a mailbox.

 A common cause for biff 'failure' is that the local mail is not really
delivered locally, but is forwarded to a file server for deposit in your
mail spool directory which your client machine is NFS mounting.  In such
a case 'biff' presumably works when you are logged into the server machine,
but not if you are logged into one of the clients.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940