ted@nieland.DAYTON.OH.US (Ted Nieland) (04/20/91)
Tape: VAX90B Section: [.DELIVER] Reviewer: Todd Aven Ease of Installation (1 - 5): 4 Documentation (1 - 5): 5 Intended Audience (General, Programmers, System Managers, etc.): General Ease of Use (1 - 5): 3 Usefulness (1 - 5): 4 Sources: Pascal, MACRO32 Objects Supplied: Yes DELIVER is a package which provides the novice user or DCL programmer with the ability to perform arbitrary actions upon incoming mail according to any part of the message header (From, To, Subject, etc.) or the body of the message. Immediately apparent jobs for DELIVER are: Forwarding messages to a new mailing address; Notifying the sender that the recipient is away on a trip; redirecting mail from multiple subscription lists to the appropriate recipients. Examples are provided for two of the three just mentioned (FORWARD, TRIP). I just implemented a gateway between normal network mail (RFC822-compliant) and a corporate mail system that doesn't understand network mail in the least. Observations (paragraph): *** DO NOT USE DELIVER WITH CTLSMB!!! *** I don't know the exact details of the conflict, but DELIVER jobs placed in a queue whose symbiont is CTLSMB will take down the system in a hurry (INVEXCPTN). Make sure that the logical name DELIVER_BATCH points to a normal batch queue. DELIVER can be a handy utility as an adjunct to VMS MAIL, but the big drawback is that one batch job is created for each mail message to be handled. The CTLSMB package is good for reducing the system load due to frequent process creation in a batch environment, as is the case when using DELIVER and/or PMDF, but DELIVER is currently incompatible with CTLSMB. For shops that don't have a large volume of mail to be handled by DELIVER, it offers a powerful hook into mail delivery. It can even be set up as a poor man's remote job entry.