NAME

comsat, in.comsat − biff server

SYNOPSIS

in.comsat

DESCRIPTION

comsat is the server process which listens for reports of incoming mail and notifies users who have requested to be told when mail arrives.  It is invoked as needed by inetd(1M), and times out if inactive for a few minutes. 

comsat listens on a datagram port associated with the biff service specification [see services(4)] for one line messages of the form

user@mailbox-offset

If the user specified is logged in to the system and the associated terminal has the owner execute bit turned on (by a biff y), the offset is used as a seek offset into the appropriate mailbox file and the first 7 lines or 560 characters of the message are printed on the user’s terminal.  Lines which appear to be part of the message header other than the From, To, Date, or Subject lines are not printed when displaying the message. 

FILES

/var/adm/utmp who’s logged on and on what terminals

SEE ALSO

services(4), inetd(1M).  biff(1). 

NOTES

The message header filtering is prone to error.  The density of the information presented is near the theoretical minimum. 

Users should be notified of mail which arrives on other machines than the one to which they are currently logged in. 

The notification should appear in a separate window so it does not mess up the screen. 
 

  —  TCP/IP