[Info-vax] Real-time new mail notification

[Michael T. Davis]

In article <xkDP6vfX2iMW at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:

>In article <hbs7q2$9df$1 at charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
> DAVISM at ecr6.ohio-stat

>
e.edu (Michael T. Davis) writes:
>> 	Has anyone developed a foreign mail protocol (or some other
>> mechanism) for real-time new mail notification?
>
>   Please define what you mean by "real-time" in this instance.  I know
>   at least six definitions and none of them seem to fit.

	At least in the case of Deliver, since it operates in batch mode,
depending on the load of the given queue(s), the notification could be
enqueued behind who-knows-how-many other jobs.  The built-in broadcast
mechanism of VMS Mail occurs during message delivery, not sometime thereafter.
In that sense, I would want the notification to operate in "real time" just as
a VMS Mail notification does.

>
>> Long-time users lament the loss of real-time new mail notification
>> available with native VMS Mail,
>
>   You just want a broadcast message to a logged in user's terminal(s)
>   when mail is received?  A simple program installed with OPER privilege
>   can call the $BRKTHRU[W] system service.  It may need WORLD privilege
>   to scan the process list and see who's logged in.
>
>   It should be straightforward to hang that off an existing mail
>   program, without the mail program itself needing any additional
>   privileges.
>

	The end-users will not have a terminal session open to the VMS system.
Instead, they run a MUA (e.g. Eudora, Thunderbird, etc.) and whatever program
provides the functionality I'm hoping to find (though it sounds increasingly
less likely I'm going to).

Regards,
Mike
--
                                         |    Systems Specialist: CBE,MSE
         Michael T. Davis (Mike)         | Departmental Networking/Computing
 http://www.ecr6.ohio-state.edu/~davism/ |     The Ohio State University
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