ANSWER: prgm for autoanswering Unix mail(1) while away

[dat at hpcnof.UUCP]

> The program answer will auto answer your unix mail while you are away.
> The best place to run this program from is via crontab(1) of course.

I find it hard to believe that I'm the only person who's ever written
an autoanswer program that has the following features:

        1.  It only has one copy running, regardless of how many people
            are using it on a given machine.

        2.  It doesn't do anything silly with the incoming mail, like
            putting it into another file...it doesn't touch the mail at
            all, in fact.

        3.  It's FAST AND it recognizes mail sent from itself, so there
            are no 'loops'...

        4.  You can bring it down and reboot and it'll work again without
            loosing track of where it was with anyone...

Hmmm...

        (Have I inspired anyone out there???)

                                        -- Dave Taylor
                                        Hewlett Packard Corp.

                                        ihnp4!hpfcla!d_taylor
                                   -or- hpcnof!dat at HPLABS