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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: help -- uucp reroute
Message-ID: <149@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Feb-86 19:07:46 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.149
Posted: Fri Feb  7 19:07:46 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 04:15:41 EST
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 29


>I need some help.  My host machine (geophiz) just died and won't be up
>for about a month.  I get lots of mail sent to geophiz!larry and it's
>all piling up in /usr/spool/uucp.  Is there any way to alias a user so
>far as rmail is concerned?  We're running 2.8BSD mail linked to rmail,
>calling bellmail to forward the mail.  It would be perfectly acceptable
>to just have the machine name undergo a translation, ie geophiz!larry
>gets rerouted to geopaz!larry.  Any ideas?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>-- 
>Larry McVoy

Take rmail and put it into /usr/lib/rmail (or somewhere else, just out
of the directory it was in.)

Write a little C program to go into /bin/rmail. Its only job will be
to pre-process the args and whatever and then exec() /usr/lib/rmail
with the corrected addresses but otherwise as if it were rmail called
in the first place. It could possibly even be done with a shell
program but I would opt for C for flexibility. If it is not mail destined
for the troubled machine your program just passes it through transparently.

I am sure there are other fixes that would work, but this kind of thing
works again and again, it's a very powerful trick. And it also will be
trivial to undo at the end of the month (just mv rmail back where it
belongs.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University