too much speech

too much speech

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Hi all,
Any ideas about how to *reduce* the amount of speech on my system would be
appreciated! (how's that for different?)
I am using a Slackware distribution (3.5, kernel 2.0.34) and after some
struggle have PINE, Lynx, FTP, etc., all working great. My problem is that
fetchmail gets my mail from the ISP and proceeds to read it immediately,
at least the first screen of each message. I have tried using the -s
(silent) option, but that only suppresses a minor part of the chatter; the
first screen of each message is still shown, and I would like it not to.
I am logged in from another PC on a serial port, and my procedure for
doing email is something like this:
(1) run the PPP-GO script to log onto my server;
(2) run fetchmail to retrieve my waiting mail (this is where it is
"previewed");
(3) run PPP-OFF to get off my server;
(4) run PINE to deal with my mail offline;

I have installed "sendmail" which actually receives and distributes my
incoming mail to the system mailbox for the current user ( have two user
accounts doing email this way).


Chuck -- Second Sight Software
Now using Linux 2.0.34 and Pine 3.96.

Re: too much speech

[Travis Siegel]

Heheh.  It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about here
when you were discussing your email problem and having it talk too much.
This is a feature of the mail system (it works on all unix variants as far
as I know) This behavior of displaying the first screen full of email as
it arrives is controled by an environment variable.  If you type biff n at
your prompt (or add it to the system wide profile as I did) then this will
no longer be the default.  Then mail will be quietly delivered to your
mailbox.  Hope this helps.

Re: too much speech

[John Schucker]

Actually, methinks biff is a program ... anyway it's similar to mesg,
which I think is a command as well.  But in any case, yeah, that'll do it
for ya.