[Info-vax] Real-time new mail notification

[Bob Gezelter]

On Oct 23, 7:33 am, DAV... at ecr6.ohio-state.edu (Michael T. Davis)
wrote:
>         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 **

Mike,

At this time, I do not personally know of any pre-packaged
solutions.although I see how one could construct such a filter.

I have been using MX as the intermediary on my systems for a long
time. It has a facility to pass mail through various filters.

At my site, I use it to auto-respond to certain addresses. It could be
modified to update a file or a database, that could then be used in a
variety of ways.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com