at the moment i want to be able to get the "you have new mail" behaviour
in my shell (see "mesg y") that delivermail used to offer me (after
writing into /var/mail/vixie), so i know when to type "inc". but i could
also imagine automating that so that it would fetch synchronously
without polling, and then run my slocal stuff or the modern equivalent.
none of that has worked for me for the last 10 years. and when i hear
you say you want to connect to imap only when and while asked, it means
IDLE won't happen, and i'm not closer to where i want to be. so, for a
lot of small reasons, i'm hoping for an nmh-agent that keeps a
persistent imap connection open.
Well, hm. I would humbly point out that the "you have new mail" shell
message, biff, etc etc, have never typically been MH's job. Yes, there
is rcvtty, which I kind of thought was odd but it turns out people DO
use it but I view that as the exception. But okay, fine. I remember
those days as well, and I admit that I wouldn't mind that behavior to
work. It just seems complicated to funnel all of the IMAP protocol
through a daemon; it seems like a giant pile of code to write and it
would be easy to get wrong, and seems like overkill if your REAL goal
is to just get a notification when new mail arrives. But ... maybe we
could approach this another way.
I just looked at RFC 2177, and it seems simple. Like, very simple to
implement. I think it would be VERY easy to write a simple tool which
just opened a connection to your IMAP server, ran the IDLE command,
waited for updates from the IMAP server and simply ran a script when
it got new mail, or blasted your tty, or, really did whatever you
told it to do. That feels to me like it fits in better with the MH
toolbox approach and (more importantly) it seems like something I could
actually write before the heat death of the universe :-). So this
tool would be the only thing to keep a persistent IMAP connection open;
the other tools would still do their thing (or they could talk to a
local IMAP caching server if that's what people prefer).
I know, you're not a fan of that because you want to keep your
password secret. I'm coming from this thinking about something that's
implementable in the limited free time I have available; I can't solve
all of your problems :-)
--Ken
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