Subject: Any readers sort incoming by username?

From: "Kevin J. Sinclair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 05:03:06 GMT

Are there any mail readers that can sort the incoming mail by username?  
Lets say my wife and I share an account, and we have wildcard forwarding 
so all mail comes in regardless if the username is typed correctly or 
not.  I want incoming mail to user 'abc' to go to folder A and incoming 
mail to user 'def' to go to folder B, automatically.  Then when I logon I 
would not look at the incoming mail like I do now, but rather just go 
right to folder A, and the wife would go straight to folder B.

Which mail readers do this, and which is best?  Thanks,

Kevin

{ Kevin J. Sinclair: [email-masked] }

-- 
Kevin

{ Kevin J. Sinclair: [email-masked] }

---

From: [email-masked] (Bill Campbell)
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 09:26:54 -0700 (PDT)

> Which mail readers do this, and which is best?  Thanks,
This isn't really the job of the mail reader, but of a Mail Delivery
Agent (MDA) like Chip Salzenberg's deliver program which can put
incoming mail into different mailboxes based on any selection criteria
you specify.  For instance, with deliver I put something in my
$HOME/.forward file like:

"|/usr/lib/mail/deliver bill"

My MTA (Mail Transport Agent) sees this and pipes the mail message to
the deliver program (WITH USER-ID SET TO bill which eliminates many
potential security problems).  Deliver looks for a $HOME/.deliver
program which is any executable program (I use perl scripts) and
executes that program looking at its standard output to determine what
to do with the mail message.  It the simplest form a shell script
could do several things:

user=$1     # this saves user name which is first argument

echo $user  # this would tell deliver to put it in my system inbox.
print "$user:$HOME/Mail/inbox1";    # save in specified mailbox.
echo DROP   # send to /dev/null -- it's probably junk.
exit 0;

Deliver splits the mail into separate $HEADER and $BODY files and sets
various environment variables like $SENDER (originator of the message)
which make it easy for the user to do things without having to parse
the mail message.  For instance, if I want to send all mail that
originates from [email-masked] where it belongs using a
shell script it might be:

case "$SENDER" in   #{
    [email-masked]: echo DROP;;
    *) echo $1;;
esac    #}

Other programs like Elm's filter do much the same thing.  I like
deliver because I don't have to learn a new language, but can use
whatever is most comfortable for me.

Bill
--
INTERNET:  [email-masked]   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software
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