Hey all,

I'm looking for a very simple program to monitor the status of sendmail and/or my internet/network connection.

The deal is sometimes I'm on dialup at home, sometimes I'm on wifi or ethernet at school, and I want to know when larger emails have been completely sent out and I can log my computer off the network.

I'm using Vector Linux (basically Slackware) with Fluxbox (window manager) and want a very basic/fast program along the lines of an applet. I'm fine (or would even prefer) something I can use at the terminal, as long as it updates the information automatically.

Perhaps there's something already in my system that would already do the trick, but I don't know what it would be. I've looked through SourceForge and can't find something simple that doesn't run off of either KDE of Gnome.

Any ideas?

e.g. small shell script:

mailq | grep 'Mail queue is empty' && echo "Your mail queue is sent ...."

If I understand right you just need a listing of the mail queue - try running:
sendmail -bp

try here:
http://www.bensinclair.com/dockapp/s...3?type=Network

Thanks for all the responses.

The command "sendmail -bp" shows exactly what I want. Is there some way to have it automatically update its contents? (Sorry if that's a simple request, but my scripting abilities are still very crude).

The wm applets are very much what I'm looking for. I'm still trying to find one, though, that monitors my *outgoing* SMTP.

I still don't understand the "mailq | grep..." script. Do I need to run it periodically to see if my mail has been sent, or do I run it once and it spits back "Your mail queue is sent..." once Sendmail is done with the outgoing messages.

btw, I also discovered iptraf which shows a lot of network information with an interactive menu at the terminal.

Again, thanks for all the help!

You could set up a quick alias (qc=queue check):
qc="while [ 1 ];do clear;sendmail -bp;sleep 5;done"

Then just run qc to check the queue - ctrl+c should break out.

That does the trick - thanks for the help!