max@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Max Hailperin) (03/22/90)
I have written a mail round-robiner for BSD-derived systems (at least SunOS and Ultrix, I haven't tried any others yet). The idea is for mail received at one mailbox to be automagically sent in round-robin rotation to each mailbox in a list. This is quite useful for providing a question-answering service, for example. I have submitted it to comp.sources.unix, so eventually it should show up there. In the meantime, if you have been desperately wishing for just such a thing, I should be able to cope with a few mail requests. Please be warned that it is not teribly polished and comes completely as is.
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (03/22/90)
Not to play one-up here, but there's an alternative that I have to mention. You could get and install the Andrew Message System, free on the X.V11R4 tape in the Andrew contributed ``toolkit'', and you can build shareable mail folders that everybody in a group can read and reply to with any of the AMS user-agent programs. Arriving mail is filed in group-handleable folders; you get to choose whether to make a daemon do this for you or to have some set of readers do it. For public bboards, make the group that can read the folder be the general public. Maybe other folder-oriented systems do this too, but it's a thought. Craig
max@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Max Hailperin) (03/23/90)
In article <8a2CRfL0BwwOENiV11@transarc.com> Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM writes: >Not to play one-up here, but there's an alternative that I have to mention. >... Andrew Message System ... shareable mail folders ... everybody in a group >can read and reply to ... Arriving mail is filed in group-handleable folders >Maybe other folder-oriented systems do this too, but it's a thought. Thanks for the suggestion; I don't believe it fills my need however, because the members of my round-robin are scattered all over the world on various networks. (In case your wondering, it's LaTeX-help@sumex-aim.stanford.edu) Naturally there are other issues, e.g. fair work allocation, but those are secondary. Others with a situation similar to mine may be interested in my code. Those with a local operation, or even one constrained to the Internet [I believe AFS only works on the Internet, right?] might be better off with your system, especially if the work-allocation was best done in a non-round-robin fashion.