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# Module: biff

Yet another incarnation of the popular biff. biff watches a user mail spool in /var/spool/mail or /var/mail for new messages, providing a readout of the number of messages currently waiting in the spool. Useful mainly for folks (like me, surprisingly) who have a local mail delivery agent and something like Fetchmail grabbing mail over an ssh connection in the background.

## Current platforms

All that use UNIX mailbox format

## Instances

single only

## additional resources

none

## Resource defaults

Resource defaults explicitly altered from the global defaults by this module:

- label: mail
- litbackground: #cccccc
- order: 200
- scalelenadj: 100
- scalerefresh: 5000
- scalereturn: 0
- scalewidadj: 80

## Possible enhancements

biff does not call 'from'. It *could*, but you'd need to spawn a helper to run the from very infrequently and asynchronously. On a system like MIT's Athena, from can require minutes to return (and may or may not exert load on the mailserver). Using 'from' is more portable, but will require some delicacy. Wathing zephyr pop notification is another possibility...

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