🚀 go-pugleaf

>         When you do a PRINT in VMS mail, it sends the current message
> you are looking at out to the printer.  What it doen't do is put a flag
> page on the front of it, even if the print queue is set up for
> DEFAULT=FLAG.  Is there anyway to fix it so that I get a flag page?
> Half page mail messages without a flag page have a tendancy to get left
> with printout that printed before it on that printer and then get sent
> to the wrong office.

Do you also have the queue set /SEP=FLAG?

>         An associated question is this.  We have a bunch of dot matrix
> printers spread around the campus in rooms where there are clusters of
> terminals.  I have set SYLOGIN.COM so that it figures out where the
> nearest of those printers is to the terminal a person is logging into
> and then redifines PRINT to send output to that print queue.  The
> problem is that MAIL doesn't seem to honor this symbol definition, which
> isn't too suprising.  What does MAIL use to initiate the print, and is
> there any good way to get a hook in there to do a redirection to some
> queue other than SYS$PRINT?

I haven't checked this, but mail almost certainly uses the technique of
setting "spool on close" bit in the file processing options of the RMS file
attributes block of the temporary file it creates to hold the messages to
be printed.  If this is the case, there is no way that I know of to get
the file to go anywhere other than SYS$PRINT.  However, don't give up hope:
ask yourself "Where IS SYS$PRINT, anyway?"  Well, you've got a queue defined
with that name, so that's where it is by default; however, what if instead
of redefining PRINT in SYLOGIN.COM to be PRINT/QUEUE=nearest_printer, you
issued a command of the form "DEFINE/JOB SYS$PRINT nearest_printer_queue"?
The answer is, PRINT without an explicit queue specification will go to
SYS$PRINT, which is now the nearest printer, and any file spooled for printing
by the mechanism described above will go there as well.