Re: mailagent and MH

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>]

Hi Brian --

Brian Mays wrote:
> Last time I checked, the popclient program simply retrieves each
> message from the server and mails it, using the generic `mail'
> program, to the user's local account.  Then the MTA, such as sendmail
> or smail, actually delivers the message, sending it to mailagent if
> instructed to in the user's .forward file.  The delay that you have
> observed is the time required for the local MTA to deliver the
> message.

You are exactly right.  I think what confused me is that popclient
sends messages to the terminal saying "reading message <N>", then
"reading message <N+1>", which I took to mean that it had finished
reading message N, and had therefore made it available for me to read.  
That was wrong, and the delay was long enough to have caused the
confusion.

This is a case of files being shifted between several buckets.
ISP -> /var/spool/mqueue -> mailagent's spool -> MH's folders.
 #1           #2                 #3                   #4

I suppose what's confusing is that what I used to do was to call MH's
'inc' command directly, which was equivalent to saying "please put my
mail messages in bucket #4".  What happened before the messages were
dumped into #4 was invisible to me.  By calling popclient directly,
which is what's required in order to cause the MTA to divert messages
through mailagent, I'm saying "please put my messages into bucket #2".
Lacking any notification that mailagent is in the process of 
moving messages from #2 to #4, I just assumed that the completion of 
the only task I executed from the command line (popclient) implied 
the completion of the whole process.  (Hmm. Somehow the fact that
this doesn't happen, and yet the user isn't notified, still 
seems non-optimum.)

Meanwhile, your interpretation is very much appreciated.  Am beginning 
to "get it."

Thanks,
Susan Kleinmann