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
