This is a replacement for the standard BSD "biff" and "comsat"
programs, which notify users when new mail arrives.  The old programs
were very limited; they would only notify a user if mail arrived in his
mailbox on the local host.  This version allows monitoring of other
users' mailboxes, even on remote hosts.

To install the programs, become root and do a make install.  That
will install the manual pages, /usr/ucb/biff, and /usr/etc/comsat.
You will need to edit /etc/services and /etc/servers (or /etc/inetd.conf,
on some systems).  Add a TCP biff service to /etc/services:

rbiff		522/tcp

and in servers or inetd.conf, comment out the line that causes
inetd to run comsat.  In /etc/servers it looks like

comsat  udp     /usr/etc/in.comsat

and in inetd.conf,

comsat	dgram	udp	wait	root	/usr/etc/in.comsat	in.comsat

Add an entry to /etc/rc.local so that comsat starts at boot time:

if [ -f /usr/etc/comsat ]; then
	/usr/etc/comsat;	(echo -n ' comsat')	>/dev/console
fi

You can remove /usr/etc/in.comsat if desired; it will no longer be
called.  Restart inetd (on some systems, sending it a HUP signal will
cause it to reload its database) and run /usr/etc/comsat.  You're
all set!

If you're installing this on your system, drop me a line.  I'm interested
to know how widely this catches on.  I'm not opposed to replacing biff
with this for the next version of BSD (or SunOS), but I'd like to be
told about it first.  Send me any suggestions or bug reports, too.
Enjoy!

---
These are my opinions, which you can probably ignore if you want to.
Steven Grimm		Moderator, comp.{sources,binaries}.atari.st
koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu	uunet!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!koreth
