mgm/doc/m-biff.html

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  15 <hr>
  16
  17 <h1>Module: biff</h1>
  18
  19 Yet another incarnation of the popular biff.  biff watches a user
  20 mail spool in /var/spool/mail or /var/mail for new messages, providing
  21 a readout of the number of messages currently waiting in the spool.
  22 Useful mainly for folks (like me, surprisingly) who have a local mail
  23 delivery agent and something like Fetchmail grabbing mail over an ssh
  24 connection in the background.<p>
  25
  26 <h2>Current platforms</h2>
  27 All that use UNIX mailbox format<p>
  28
  29 <h2>Instances</h2>
  30 single only
  31
  32 <h2>additional resources</h2>
  33 none<p>
  34
  35 <h2>Resource defaults</h2>
  36
  37 Resource defaults explicitly altered from the global defaults by this
  38 module:
  39
  40 <ul>
  41 <li>label: mail
  42 <li>litbackground: #cccccc
  43 <li>order: 200
  44 <li>scalelenadj: 100
  45 <li>scalerefresh: 5000
  46 <li>scalereturn: 0
  47 <li>scalewidadj: 80
  48 </ul>
  49
  50 <h2>Possible enhancements</h2>
  51
  52 biff does not call 'from'.  It *could*, but you'd need to spawn a
  53 helper to run the from very infrequently and asynchronously.  On a
  54 system like MIT's Athena, from can require minutes to return (and may
  55 or may not exert load on the mailserver).  Using 'from' is more
  56 portable, but will require some delicacy.  Wathing zephyr pop
  57 notification is another possibility...<p>
  58
  59
  60 <hr>
  61 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">
  62 <img src="white-xifish.gif" align=left border=0>
  63 </a>
  64 <p>
  65 <font size=-2 color=#505050>
  66
  67 MGM will not get your whites whiter or your colors brighter.  It will,
  68 however, sit there and look spiffy while sucking down a major
  69 honking wad of RAM.<p>
  70
  71 MGM, Xiphophorus and their logos are trademarks (tm) of
  72 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiphophorus</a>.  These pages are
  73 copyright (C) 1994-1999 Xiphophorus. All rights reserved.<p>
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