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From: wmartin@ALMSA-1.ARPA (Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Can a user \"prod\" a remote host?
Message-ID: <4144@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 25-Sep-86 12:10:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.4144
Posted: Thu Sep 25 12:10:30 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Sep-86 19:13:37 EDT
Sender: news@brl-smoke.ARPA
Lines: 32

Is there any way that an ordinary user can "prod" or signal a remote host
across the ARPA/MILNET to cause that remote host to check for and start
the sending process for mail that may be queued up for delivery to the
user's host?

An example: my host has had problems for some days, such as the network 
connection being down, or the machine being down -- something that has
prevented it from receiving mail from the network. It comes back up,
and some incoming mail is delivered. I, as a user on that machine, look
at the mail and can tell that there is still some missing (such as some
mailing-list digests, where issues are numbered and I can see that I have
not received certain numbers). Is there something I can do using the
"telnet" or "ftp" capability to reach across the network to the host
that sends out these messages and tell it that it should now search its
out-bound queues for any mail to my host and start the regular mail delivery
process?

This could be especially valuable if I knew, for example, that my host 
will be up for a short time and will then go down again, and that the remote
machine normally delivers mail to us at night when I know that my computer
will be down again. So if I could trigger an unscheduled, right-now mail
delivery, the traffic would get through -- if I do nothing, and let the
scheduled processes run things, there would be another unsucessful
delivery attempt and perhaps the mailer would time out and reject the mail
back to the sender.

I recall that there were some methods for a person to simulate an
automatic net-mail-type host-to-host connection; that led me to wonder
if such a method could be used to trigger a remote machine to start up
such a process.

Regards, Will Martin