hello all... i'm running slack8, which came with a nifty little feature which outputs the first few lines of an email in the terminal or console when a new mail is received.

basically, i'd like to know how i can modify this to check another user's account. here's the situation:

i log into my box as root, which has sendmail and other various network services running. whenever i receive mail as root@domain.com the first few lines of the email are outputted to the console as soon as the mail is received. this is very useful, as it saves me from constantly checking for new mail. the only problem is that i don't receive mail as root, i receive it as another user. so while in root, in order to check that mail, i need to su in as the user and run pine. in order to make this less of a hastle, i've set pine to open the mailbox of my mail id and not root when opened as root, which works great. however, the only time i receive the mail alert is when mail is sent to me as root, and not as the other user. does anyone know how to change this so whe i'm logged in as root this mail notification program will check the other account? i really have no idea what this program is, it just came installed with slack8.

i appreciate any insight. :-)

I'm not a user of sendmail (thank gosh), too painful to setup for my brain. But, as far as a general response of insight. the fetchmail program is one that you will probably want to look into to use in conjunction with sendmail for user accounts. To automate this process of fetching the user's mail and using sendmail to shoot it to pine or whatever, you can use a cronjob. The man page for crontab is very decent and easy to understand. Sorry if this was too general, hope it helps with some idears though.

The program that Slack is using for e-mail notification is biff. and AFAIK, there is no way to make biff check another user's account. But there is no lack of e-mail notification programs out there. I'm sure one will work for you just as you want.

Comon practice, however, is to always log on with a user account, and only su to root when you need to perform a specific task. You would therefore also create an e-mail alias for root that points to your user account.

excellent... all i really needed was the name of the program. thanx!

i login as root because i'm usually always doing work on my system that requires root access, so it's a bit of a pain having to su to root all the time.