MMDF, Smail and Elm Mailer

[Jeff Beadles]

In article <8911202358.AA14298 at decwrl.dec.com> paine at fungus.dec.com (Willy Paine) writes:
|
|I recently upgrade to SCO UNIX from Xenix/386.  SCO Unix comes with MMDF
|and Sendmail and MMDF is driving me nuts!!   I am trying to get rid of
|MMDF, especially  ^A^A^A^A in /usr/spool/mail area because ELM does not
|like this at all and I get error message:
|
|Reading in /usr/spool/mail/root, message:0
|Folder is corrupt !!  I can't read it!!
|
|Elm works fine ONLY after I delete ^A^A^A^A (real ctl-A).  I want to get
|rid of this control characters.   I have ELM v2 PL0 and I still dont
|have any other patches from PL0 to PL13 at all.  I prefer to get patch
|via email or archiver and I dont have FTP at all.
|
|I have tried to replace mail, rmail and execmail but ELM appears to look
|for sendmail and other mail file and then it went back to MMDF for
|adding ^A^A^A^A.  I still dont understand how mail works.

I had this very same problem.  I solved it by a hack.  (At least I admit it :-)

What I did was this;  I replaced the local mailer (/usr/lib/mailers/local) with
my own very special copy.  What it does, is when delivering a message, it
checks to see if there is something (a directory, file, anything) called ".elm"
in the user's home directory.  If it is there, then I don't add the bloody
^A's.  If it's not there, then I assume that they still want to use mh-mail,
and put the ^A's there for them.

Since I've got source access to the os, making this change wasn't difficult.
If you want the diffs, let me know.  I can't send the source though, sorry...

	-Jeff
-- 
Jeff Beadles		Utek Engineering, Tektronix Inc.
jeff at quark.WV.TEK.COM