Traditionally, one of the things that the standard login programdid when you logged in was to look at the state of your mailbox andreport 'you have (new) mail' if this was the case. This worked wellwhen everyone logged in to Unix systems on serial terminals, sort ofwell when people used telnet and rlogin (both of which actually run login ), and went downhill when SSH became common, because SSH does notrun login at all.

Clearly the right solution (in the PAM world)

Talking of Unix workstations , there's somemythology about them that seems to go around, or at least that may begoing around and I feel like preemptively shooting down.

First, people who think that 1990s era Unix workstations were marvelsof performance and features that have yet to be surpassed either have avery selective memory, were using very high end hardware from SGI, ornever really used those workstations. I have used everything from Sun3/50s onwards, and I can assure