[Info-vax] Real-time new mail notification

[Michael T. Davis]

	Has anyone developed a foreign mail protocol (or some other
mechanism) for real-time new mail notification?  I remember way back when,
Pathworks for VMS had the "Pathworks Listener" that could inform an end-user
of mail delivered to the VMS server.  This is the kind of thing I'm seeking.
I know I could try to leverage Deliver (either standalone, or from PMDF), but
since it relies on a batch process, I wouldn't really consider this "real-
time."  Deliver also modifies the message headers, which is not desirable.  It
would be nice if the solution was Web based on the client, to keep things
"platform agnostic."  I see that, besides Mac OS X, Growl is being developed
for Windows, and that might be a suitable alternative platform for the client.
(There's apparently also something called "mumbles" for Linux, which provides
support for Growl Network Notification messages.)

	For some background, we've migrated the vast majority of our users
over to Process' PMDF MessageStore (or MsgStore).  In our environment, this
calls for creating a forwarding address in VMS Mail pointing to the MsgStore
address.  Long-time users lament the loss of real-time new mail notification
available with native VMS Mail, so I'm on the hunt for a way to maintain that
functionality.  We don't want to use any of the myriad of polling-based mail
checkers; it's bad enough that users specify tiny wait times to check their
mail automatically to try to approach the old behavior.

Regards,
Mike
--
                                         |    Systems Specialist: CBE,MSE
         Michael T. Davis (Mike)         | Departmental Networking/Computing
 http://www.ecr6.ohio-state.edu/~davism/ |     The Ohio State University
                                         |     197 Watts, (614) 292-6928
                   ** E-mail is the best way to contact me **