Mail server

[....What Is?....]

Hi, I don't know which newsgroup to route this to, so here we go
anyways.  I just wrote a "mail server" program that reads my mail file
(on a BSD 4.3 Tahoe system), picks out letters with certain key
subjects, and processes the message body (for instance, it'll send out
help files for a few programs that I made publicly executable.)

The problem is trying to avoid clashes between sendmail and my program.
If the timing is off (which it is a lot more often than I expected),
new letters that are waiting for the file not to be busy get eaten as
soon as I close the file.

How do I get around this?  Please mail replies; I haven't been reading
news regularly lately.

Thanks,
	Steve Boswell
	sboswell at ucsd.edu