Silent mail handler

[David B. Thomas]

azar at morpho.UUCP (Jim Van Horn) writes:

>I've recently noticed that my machine doesn't leave an audit-trail

>Is it common to replace the mail handler on a 3b1?  If so, what are
>the choices?

>The Stats: 3b1, 3.51m, HDB uucp form osu-cis STORE, mail reader is mush.

I heartily recommend smail.  It's small, simple, understands
internet addressing well, and does add a "Received" line to
the headers.  It also does some nice things like forwarding
and aliasing, without suffering from "feeping creaturitis" :-)

smail is available from uunet and elsewhere.  It was posted some
time back to comp.sources.something.  Anybody having a better idea
where it is is encouraged to post.  Actually, it's rather small,
so I could easily mail it to anybody wanting it.  It comes with
a complete set of man pages.

Smail is a "mail transfer agent", and is linked to rmail, so it
is called first for incoming mail via uucp.  It does not run
setuid, but passes the message on to your original stock mailer
(renamed to /bin/lmail), which does have the privs necessary
to deliver the message locally, if it was destined for your
machine.

I used mush for a long time as a mail reader, but I tried elm and
now I like that better, especially since I have novice users
on my system.  But don't get the idea from that comment that it's
wimpy -- it's just intuitive, where mush is not.  I'm a hacker
and all that, but I don't like having to hack my way through
things that ought to be intuitive like reading mail.  That's
why I prefer elm to mush, and nn to rn for news.

Anyway, to quit rambling, I use smail, elm, Cnews and nn, and
they seem like good choices for the 3b1.

					little david
-- 
Bottom of stack = 0x40000
Stack pointer   = 0x3fffe
Don't push it!