The lady who wrote biff now works here at Pixar. Biff was named after her dog (long dead).
Biff set an otherwise-unused execute permission bit on your terminal device (/dev/tty??) which told comsat that you wanted to be informed about new mail. Comsat did all of the work. I think that comsat just ran stat(2) on your mailbox every minute or so, and if the mailbox had been written since it had last been read it looked at the start of the new data, parsed the message, and told you about it. It did not need to interact with the mail delivery system at all except to read the spool file. Biff has long been obsolete. One of the various ways of starting a program in response to a mail message (procmail or mailagent can help with this) can be used to perform its function. Bruce -- Bruce Perens K6BP [EMAIL PROTECTED] 510-215-3502 Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key. PGP fingerprint = 88 6A 15 D0 65 D4 A3 A6 1F 89 6A 76 95 24 87 B3