dbiff provides a means to bark at the mailman, similar to that provided by the
BSD comsat daemon, but without needing to run an actual daemon.

Due to the limitations in the comsat protocol, it becomes useless to anyone
storing mail in a format other than mbox or delivering mail through an
external MDA, such as procmail, and the necessity of giving a daemon
permission to read everyone's mail may be undesirable.  dbiff's solution to
all of this is read mail from stdin, so it can be run by the user from
wherever he or she may desire.

BUILDING

dbiff has been autoconfed and automaked, so running 

	./configure ; make ; make install 

behaves as you might expect.  I didn't add any configure options myself, but
you can still look through the output of

	./configure --help

for some of the options autoconf thinks might be nice.

USING

Just run the mail for which you want notices through dbiff.  If you prefer the
output of Dan Bernstein's qbiff, pass it "dbiff -q".  If you do this from your
.forward or similar, be careful to ensure that your mail is still delivered to
somewhere, instead of just passed to dbiff.

For example, you may put something like the following in your .forward:

	/home/david/.mailbox
	|dbiff

or in your .procmailrc:

	:0 hbc
	|dbiff

Setting a terminal to receive biff messages is done by setting the
owner-execute bit, which can be easily accomplished through the BSD biff tool.
Some BSDs add a "bell" mode, which prints bell characters to a terminal
instead of a message, and this can be activated by unsetting the owner-execute
bit and setting the group-execute bit.  FreeBSD sets this using "biff b".

OUTPUT

The output from dbiff should be similar enough to that of BSD comsat and qbiff
that you won't notice the difference.

In classic (default) mode, dbiff will print the From: line, the Subject: line,
and part of the body of the message, up to a total of seven lines or 560
characters, whichever comes first, ending with either "----" or "...more...",
as appropriate.

Example:

  New mail for david@fiona has arrived:
  ----
  From: biff@example.com
  Subject: Increase your penis size in just 30 days
  Look at me!
  I'm an email!
  
  No, really!
  ----

In qbiff mode, dbiff will print out the from address, and, all on one line, up
to 74 characters of subject and body

Same example:

  *** TO <david> FROM <biff@example.com>
       Increase your penis size in just 30 days//Look at me!/I'm an email!//No, 

And that's all there is to it.

A NOTE ON AUTOCONF

I'm one of those people who feel that autoconf is ridiculously unnecessary,
automake is a horrible hack, and the GNU coding style of hitting every source
file with a shotgun blast of preprocessing only makes for unreadable code with
new and unexpected behavior rather than any increase in portability.  Software
should make itself portable by adhering to standards rather than attempting
guesses at the different specific behaviors of every system in the world.

However, there are some cases when various systems are horribly different,
and utmp is one of those.  FreeBSD does not have the POSIX *utxent functions,
and POSIX systems don't necessarily put utmp in a file.  Autoconf doesn't
actually solve this problem, and I spent about 5 times as long writing m4 
macros as I did on the actual dbiff source.  However, broken as it may be,
autoconf provides the framework for performing such pre-compile-time
configuration, and it is with this in mind that I used it for dbiff.  Also,
the combination of autoconf and automake provide a certain degree of
consistency that is often found wanting in UNIX software packages.

Besides all this, I find a certain joyous symmetry in moving dbiff to this new
extreme, when the previous release didn't even have a Makefile ;)