Would someone explain how to do this. I need an idiot's description. I tried to get my mail to go through a filter once....twice actually. Never did get it to work.

Well, I'll give it a shot. Sendmail optionally reads a file in your home directory named .forward, and follows the instructions there. Typically, a .forward contains another address, in which case mail sent gets forwards to the address in the .forward file. For example, my .forward file on tree.egr.uh.edu is elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu so any mail sent to barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu gets forwarded to elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu. A more interesting application is to forward your mail to a command (pipe mail to a command). In that case, the .forward file reads "|/path/mycommand options" and mail gets piped to mycommand for further processing. For instance, the vacation program works by piping incoming mail to vacation, which both files and responds for you. Also, the cypherpunk remailers work by using a .forward file to pipe incoming mail to the scripts which make up the remailer. Yet another example is the slocal program which is part of the mh mail system; incoming mail gets piped to slocal, which in turn relies on a configuration file (.maildelivery) which contains instructions for handling the mail. My idea was to have all mail sent to barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu piped through pgp and then mailed to elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu. The rough idea is to do this: "|/path/pgp -fea barrus | mail elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu" Here, incoming mail gets piped to 'pgp -fea barrus' which encrypts the message with my public key, and the result is piped to 'mail elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu' which then mails the encrypted result to me. For various reasons I'm still exploring, this didn't work (even with PGPPATH set, piping to a script, etc. I've got more things to try to see why it isn't working.) on the NeXT. So, I tried to do this from the menudo.uh.edu side. Using the slocal program and the associated .maildelivery file, I have mail which comes from barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu (remember my mail from tree is forwarded to menudo) piped through 'pgp -fea barrus' and then the result is piped into an mh command which stores the mail in a folder. Of course, this isn't a substitute for end-to-end encryption. Here, mail travels all the way to me before getting encrypted, so if somebody wanted to snoop me they could just stand between the sender and my account and eavesdrop. A better solution would be to have the sender encrypt the message! But as I mentioned I was trying to set this up so that replies to a USENET posting got encrypted before finally getting dropped on menudo. An improvement would be for me to get the encryption and remailing working on the NeXT, but again, this is inferior to having the sender encrypt in the first place. You mentioned trying to put your mail through a filter - were you trying to use the filter command of elm? Sometimes you have to watch subtle things like file permissions (slocal will not use a .maildelivery file that is group or other readable) or pathnames (try putting the fill path names when you use commands). /-----------------------------------\ | Karl L. Barrus | | elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu | <- preferred address | barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu (NeXTMail) | \-----------------------------------/