On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Ford Prefect wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Lucas Merckelbach wrote:
> > Just figured it out how to read mail from a pop3 server. I use fetchmail
> > for doing this in combination with pine. There is still one annoying
> > problem. Each time when mail arrives I get a message on my screen
> > containing the first few lines or so plus more ... Well, nice that the
> > compu tells me that new mail arrived, but when I work in f.i. emacs I can't
> > get rid of the screen filling, so exit it and restart emacs seems to be the
> > only solution. Which program produces the text on screen? Can I turn it
> > off, just leaving a beep?
>
> Add to your .login (or .profile or .cshrc, etc..) the command
> biff n
>
> This will disable all notification of new mail. Then depending on your
> window manager you could use something like wmmail or asmail, etc. (I'm
> sure there's others too
The source of mail notification is the command "biff y" in the
/etc/profile file. If you comment this out (with a #) or change it to
"biff n", then no user on your system will get those annoying lines.
Anyway, if you get them during the editing of a text (which is like a
Murphy law :-) you don't have to quit and restart. Just ignore them, or
scroll up or down a screen, or issue the "redraw" command (in emacs that
is ESC x redraw-display). The lines will go away, because they were only
on the screen, not in the buffer you are editing.
