reading mail locally

[Will Lowe <lowe@cis.udel.edu>]

Ok,  again,  now that I'm back at school,  I'd like to have all my
email/news reading be local,  on my debian box,  rather than on the
central servers.  I can forward mail via .forward or .maildelivery (on two
different systems).  

The problem is this:  my machine is (unfortunately) still running Win95 on
(rare) occaisions,  and is also prone to the power outages caused by the
microwaves of the other residents.  In essence,  I need a way for my
machine to receive mail when booted to debian,  but not have that mail
get lost if the system is down (which,  over breaks,  etc.,  can mean a
week or more of downtime).  I've thought of two solutions,  but maybe
someone else has another way.

Solutions:

1)  Forward mail to my machine (rivendell) by forwarding it all to one of
my remote accounts,  and setting up a system that,  when rivendell boots,
logs onto the remote account and replaces the .maildelivery with one that
forwards mail to rivendell,  reinstating the original .maildelivery when
rivendell goes to shutdown.

2) Set up a cron-driven sort of thing that (every five minutes,  or
whatever) rcp's my /var/spool/mail/~user file from each of several hosts,
appending them all to /var/spool/mail/harpo on rivendell.

Any suggestions,  comments,  or other thoughts?  Is there a package to do
this automagically?

                     					Will

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               		       lowe@cis.udel.edu
			 http://www.cis.udel.edu/~lowe/
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