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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!ncc!lyndon
From: lyndon@ncc.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: smail "front end" query
Message-ID: <132@ncc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 14:06:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncc.132
Posted: Wed Oct 21 14:06:07 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Oct-87 09:54:23 EDT
References: <838@seradg.Dayton.NCR.COM> <127@ncc.UUCP> <1829@killer.UUCP> <1854@killer.UUCP>
Organization: Nexus Computing Corp.
Lines: 33
Keywords: smail mailx Subject etc
Summary: About Subject: prompts

In article <1854@killer.UUCP>, billw@killer.UUCP (Bill Wisner) writes:
  
> We want smail to handle delivery of EVERYTHING. With svbinmail installed
> as /bin/mail, this happens: even those people (shudder) who insist on using
> /bin/mail to send mail can still reap the benefits of smail. /bin/mail now
> resides in /bin/lmail, but this is completely transparent to the user; he
> need only type mail like he always did.

My experience was that most users didn't even notice the changeover!
Basically, the smart users already had mail aliased to mailx. The
not-so-smart users couldn't care less, as long as the mail gets delivered.
By making mailx the default (and only) UA, a user can mail to a@b.c and
not have binmail choke. The is much nicer than a cryptic binmail error
message.
  
> The person I was responding to said he had replaced /bin/mail with /bin/mailx
> or some such; I don't remember which. My point with cron was that is the
> program in /bin/maiil starts prompting for a Subject, you never know in what
> wierd ways things might begin to act differently. Best not to tempt the fates,
> I say.

Mailx only prompts for a Subject: line if stdin is attached to a terminal.
As I indicated in a previous posting, I maintain five systems, all of
which use the above mailer setup. Each of these systems mails a series
of daily and weekly summaries from cron jobs. No problem at all. What's
*really* nice about this setup is that I can do things like:

/usr/adm/nitecheck | mail[x] -s "Nightly accounting check" lyndon@ncc.uucp

This gives me a subject header on output from cron jobs. If one of the
scripts finds something particulary nasty, the subject line can be
changed to start with "WARNING!" to flag it as important. When you get
70 - 100 pieces of mail/day this is quite helpful.