[170] in resnet
athena mailboxes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason M. Sachs)
Fri Feb 4 11:30:21 1994
To: echoi@MIT.EDU, resnet@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 94 11:29:30 EST
From: Jason M. Sachs <nosaj@MIT.EDU>
Um, please don't re-email messages from your Athena account to yourself.
First of all, it's unnecessary load on the mail servers.
Second of all, your scheme has a chance of being confused;
suppose you have messages A, B, and C in your Athena mailbox.
(i.e. incorporated). You run your program on Athena; it sends
A, B, and C to yourself, and perhaps a message D arrives,
so A, B, C, and D are in your unincorporated mailbox (on the PO server).
Then you go over to TechMail and incorporate A, B, C, and D.
Message D never gets to your athena account. (And you still
haven't deleted A, B, and C from your Athena account, so there's
a copy of those both places---what happens the next time you run the
program? A third copy of A, B, and C....)
Syncing mail between platforms is definitely an important issue (since
you can't share a filesystem) and needs to be talked about. TechMail
does use a standard format; I believe an mh-to-rmail translator exists.
What I would do would be something like this:
* Have some C program which runs an mh-to-rmail translator, and keeps
track of the time of the last-translated message, so it only translates
those messages which have not been translated so far.
* Rmail format is one-file-per-inbox (I believe), so I'd ftp the single
file from Athena to my PC.
* Run a program on the PC to incorporate that file into the PC inbox.
(I'm not sure if TechMail can already do something like this [combine
two inboxes])
* Then delete the single file on Athena.
Granted, you can actually do what you're doing now, which is an advantage,
but in the long run it's not, and people shouldn't just do this and call the
problem solved.
--Jason
