Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!apple!olivea!oliveb!veritas!tron
From: tron@Veritas.COM (Ronald S. Karr)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: SMail and biff
Keywords: smail, biff, comsat
Message-ID: <1991May18.043542.27251@Veritas.COM>
Date: 18 May 91 04:35:42 GMT
References: <2989@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Organization: VERITAS Software
Lines: 36

In article <2989@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk writes:
>1) Does anyone have a biff notifier transport written and available ?
>2) What is involved in writing a specific transport for this task ?
>   I know the functions needed to communicate with biff, but I am
>   unfamiliar with how to tie this into the SMail transport mechanism.

I don't really know how biff works (I never used it, though I have
written similar things myself using shell scripts called from smail).
However, if you can write a program that informs biff of what it needs
to know, then you should be able to call it using a shadow transport
from smail.  To do this, change the "local" transport to something
like:

	local:	driver=appendfile, return_path, local, from, unix_from_hack,
		shadow=kick_biff;

		# change the stuff below as appropriate for your OS
		file=/usr/mail/${lc:user}, group=mail, mode=0600,
		suffix="\n"		

	kick_biff:
		driver=pipe, local, from;

		# call your biff program with the user as the one argument
		cmd="/your/biff/program ${lc:user}",
		# allow the program to exit without reading the entire
		# message
		ignore_write_error,
		-log_output

If you need to, you can also call your biff program under a specific
user or group, for example, you can call it with group "tty" to access
ttys directly.
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