On Tuesday, Apr 8, 2003, at 21:03 US/Pacific, Jim Correia wrote:
How do people normally deal the situation of getting notification on
the MUA machine that mail has been delivered to an arbitrary mail
folder on the server? (Check by hand? Use a client that polls all
folders? Some other solution?)
For me, I wrote a script called "fom" (figure of merit, a Navy sonar
term ... and also the way I used to always typo writing 'from') that
scans all of the mail folders I tell it to (as well as polling my news
server and a legacy bbs from my college days) and tells me how many
"new" messages I have. But it has to run on the server, and depends
upon me being able to get right at the server data (I run UW-IMAP right
now, and when I switch over to CommuniGate Pro, I expect I'll have to
find a different solution). I run it from my laptop via ssh. I may
replace that with running it via finger, but I'm concerned about
privacy on that level (since it will allow anyone to find out what
mailing lists I'm subscribed to and stuff, as well as the general
"finger helps crackers find info about users" problem).
There's also NotifyMail (I think that's what it's called, and I think
it runs on Windows and Mac OS X, but I'm not sure about other
platforms). It's a program that sits on your client machine and
listens on port 79 (fingerd). It basically turns "finger user(_at_)client"
into a mail delivery notification. You tell the mail server that when
you get new mail, it should "finger user(_at_)client". NotifyMail catches
that and gives you a pop-up alert.
I don't know if there's any way for NotifyMail to tell you which folder
or anything like that, or keep a running total. And certainly if the
client machine is asleep or off, you'll miss those notifications, so
it's not perfect. I'm sure you could easily set up a procmail rule for
doing the finger, though.
(what Mail.app ought to do is use the IMAP "Listen" command (I think
that's the command name), which puts that stream into a passive mode
where the IMAP server just sends any new message announcements
uninterrupted until the IMAP client says otherwise; Mail.app could open
a separate stream/socket (since it already does 1 stream per folder),
and just keep listening for new messages showing up and updating
folders when they do)
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