Subsections

• Setting up a Mailbox Icon
• Being Told About Mail at a UNIX Prompt

How to Know When You Have Mail

Setting up a Mailbox Icon

If you use an RCS UNIX workstation, a mailbox icon appears every time you log. It signals the arrival of new mail messages. Xbiff is the name of the program that checks your mail. When mail arrives, the flag on the mailbox will go up and the icon will change color. When you have read your new mail, the flag on the mailbox will go down and the icon will change back to its default color.

Being Told About Mail at a UNIX Prompt

If you are logged into RCS through a non-graphical remote connection, you cannot display a mailbox icon. Instead, it is possible for you to have a message displayed notifying that you have mail every time the UNIX prompt is displayed.

To do this, use an editor to place the following lines in your .bashrc file, replacing userid with your own userid:

MAILCHECK=900
MAILPATH=´/usr/spool/mail/userid´
MAILMSG=´You have mail´

Make sure there are no spaces surrounding the equals sign (=) and that the first word on each line is in all capital letters. This tells BASH, the program that prompts you for commands, to check for mail every time it prints a UNIX prompt, but no more frequently than every 15 minutes (900 seconds). If it finds mail, it prints the message You have mail.