#### 3.16.3 Bulletins ¶

The bulletin feature allows you to send important announcements to all POP3 users without mailing them. It works by creating a bulletin source mailbox and sending the announcements to it.

After a user successfully authenticates, `pop3d` checks the last bulletin number the user receives. The bulletin number refers to the number of the bulletin message in the bulletin source mailbox. If the latter contains more messages, these are appended to the user mailbox.

The user last bulletin number can be kept in two places. First, it can be stored in file `.popbull` in his home directory. Secondly, if Mailutils is compiled with DBM support, the numbers can be kept in a DBM file, supplied via `bulletin-db` configuration statement. If both the database and the `.popbull` file are present, the data from the database take precedence.

To enable this feature, use the following configuration statements:

`bulletin-source mbox`

  Set the URL of the bulletin source mailbox.

`bulletin-db file`

  Set the name of the database file to keep last bulletin numbers in.

The following example instructs `pop3d` to look for the bulletin messages in MH folder `/var/spool/bull/mbox` and to keep the database of last delivered bulletin numbers in `/var/spool/bull/numbers.db`:

    bulletin-source mh:/var/spool/bull/mbox;
    bulletin-db /var/spool/bull/numbers.db;