[Info-vax] Real-time new mail notification

[Jose Baars]

On 23 okt, 16:39, Bob Gezelter <gezel... at rlgsc.com> wrote:
> 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

Just a thought: mail sends the notifications by terminal broadcast.
It might be possible to have one process open a number of virtual
terminals
for all users interested and catch the broadcasts.
Security and resource concerns would be interesting problems to solve.