Subject: Re: Mail to all users...

From: [email-masked] (Chris Koenigsberg)
Date: Thu, 2 May 1996 19:29:41 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Magnus Sundin - Postmaster Studentdatorutskottet  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I'm postmaster at Malardalen University's student server.
>Sometime we wish to send mail to all Users on our server...
>Is it possible to configure Pine to "send mail" to all users, not one copy
>in each users mailbox, just a link-message to a file that only appears
>once when the user access Pine...

Interesting question.

Note that for users who are logging in to interactive Unix accounts,
you have the "msgs" program to put out system messages, plus the
/etc/motd "message of the day" file. (unless they figure out
".hushlogin" :-)

Also if you can get everyone to read Usenet news, you can post to a
newsgroup and request that everyone subscribe to it. (voluntary
solutions like this are not always feasible or desirable though)

But if users are accessing their mail remotely via IMAP and not
logging in to your server, neither seeing "msgs" nor "/etc/motd", what
then?

Sending mail to all users, one copy to every mailbox, really is not
the ideal way to accomplish your goal.

Perhaps IMAP could use something like the "POP bulletin" facility,
available with the Qualcomm Pop3 server. This does exactly what you
suggest, it uses a single master copy of the message, which is then
automatically downloaded by every POP3 client. (well, so there ARE
multiple copies generated, one on each POP client's hard disk, but at
least not in every mailbox on the server system disk, and not going
through the mail queues and local mail delivery system!)

With POP bulletins, all POP3 users will see the latest bulletins added
since their last Inbox download session, as if they had actually been
delivered to the user's inbox (mail spool drop file). Bulletins are
accessed by the POP server as individual message files in a system
directory, e.g. /var/spool/pop. Every user has a ".popbull" file
recording the number of the last bulletin they have downloaded (we've
modified our copy of the server, to keep a user's record as
".username.popbull" in a common /var/spool/pop directory, so we can
have POP-only users with no home directory on the server)

We are hopefully going to offer IMAP-only service sometime in the
future, so we would be interested in such an "IMAP bulletin" facility.

I guess you COULD do it by requesting all users to subscribe to a
certain shared "sytem bulletin" IMAP mailbox... which could indeed be
a Usenet newsgroup ....

You COULD put such a subscription into the fixed global Pine config,
for interactive Unix login Pine users at least, but then again they
would all see the "msgs" and /etc/motd anyway.

The real question is, what about remote IMAP-only users, using
PC-Pine?

Chris Koenigsberg
U. of Chicago Academic Computing Services
[email-masked], [email-masked]
http://www2.uchicago.edu/ns-acs/ckk/index.html
(also http://www.pobox.com/~ckk)

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 1996 19:41:10 -0700 (PDT)

Chris,
IMAP has the concept of an "ALERT", but this is oriented to single
line messages, e.g. "System going down in 20 min."

With Pine or PC-Pine, a user will be asked to acknowledge the alert.

There is nothing in IMAP to prevent stuffing a canned message in each
mailbox, but this would indeed take up space in every mailbox.

Some form of shared folder arrangement makes sense, but Pine doesn't
provide any particular help in making sure people see it.

-teg