[Gllug] emai notification on login

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2012, Konrad Vrba wrote:

> thanks for your suggestions, I am not using POP or IMAP, I am reading
> my emails locally using Alpine email client.  In my home directory,
> there is a "mail" folder where Alpine stores my "sent-messages". But
> my incoming emails are kept in /var/mail/$username.

I think I recall the command biff would check access time being older
than modify or change time, and use that as the basis for alerting that
new email had arrived, people ran xbiff for a gui version and I got
quite used to SunOS mailtool which would trebble beep.  When I switched
from mailtool to pine I missed the beeps so wrote my own biff-a-like.
Tnis is 17+ years ago mind! 

You should check what in your login shell is doing the check (perhaps
set -x in a newly opened login shell) and see if that command takes
parameters so that it only notify on new, rather than just some, email.

I tend to keep an alpine session open in a specific GNU screen window on
all my systems, so I don't care about my login warning me if I have new
mail, let alone the fact that I have any at all.  These days I basically
ALWAYS have new mail.

> Is there any reason why this should be different ? I am using postfix
> as a mail server.

Of course not, this is how people have done it for many many years.
It's pretty similar to what I do.

 - Damion
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