Re: tlug: Slackware questions

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

> 1.	How can I access the postmaster's mail?  His mailbox fills up
>   	quickly, and I have just resorted to deleting the whole mailbox,
>   	and making a new empty one, and chowning it to the postmaster. 
>   	I am assuming that there's an easier way though...

I'm not quite sure what is being asked.  Below, I've assumed that you have
an actual account called "postmaster", and that you need a means of getting
at its contents via something more sophisticated than "more".  If that's the
wrong assumption, ignore what is written below and wait for a more sensible
response.

The postmaster mail name is normally an alias that points at whoever
actually handles mail problems.  The way you set up an alias varies a little
from one system to another, but look for man pages on "mkaliases" and
"newalias(es)".  Most often, the aliases and the addresses they point at is
stored in a file called (brace yourself for this one) /etc/aliases.

(More generally, on the mail server here I've adopted the principle that, as
accounts are open to abuse, they should only be held by real people that are
capable of feeling the heat if they do something that gets up the system
administrator's nose.  Mail to names of administrative positions and classes
of persons and stuff like that is all handled using aliases instead of real
accounts.)

Once you've got an alias set up, it will normally take over for the account
immediately (you can test this by sending a message to that name, and seeing
where it turns up).  You can then cat "postmaster >> guy_responsible" and
close out the existing "postmaster" account with something like "userdel -m
postmaster" (varies from system to system, don't take my word for it!).

If you still need to keep postmaster mail separate from general
correspondence, use a mail filter (procmail, say) inside the (real-person)
postmaster's account.  If you use Gnus, you can both use it to filter the
postmaster mail to a separate group, and set the group to expire messages
after a certain amount of time (one week, say) has passed, so that it
doesn't build up on you -- just as a news server would do.
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