Administrative Hinweise, Hinweise zu Qmail, Hinweise zu Nbiff

NBIFF

NAME

nbiff -- networked biff

SYNOPSIS

nbiff [-geometry geometry]

DESCRIPTION

nbiff informs about new email messages received. Unlike other biff programs, however, nbiff does not watch mailboxes itself but requires to be notified by a short network contact passing sender address and subject. This is usually done by its companion notifynbiff.

Initially, nbiff creates a window offering two buttons: OPEN and QUIT. OPEN causes the window of nbiff to minimized and the command in ~/.nbiffcmd to be invoked, if present. Later, on receiving email notifications, the window becomes larger and presents an additional line for each new message (up to a limit of 5 messages).

TECHNICAL DETAILS

nbiff opens a socket and stores its hostname and the port number in a little file in the ~/.nbiffports directory. Notifier like notifynbiff are then free to scan this directory and to open a short-lived connection to pass the message information for each of the running nbiff programs. Files in ~/.nbiffports will be removed automatically when notifynbiff is unable to establish a connection.

BUGS

Currently nbiff does not support any customizations except for the geometry parameter.

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