[Info-vax] Real-time new mail notification

[Jeremy Begg]

Hi Mike,

Given this is a PMDF question you might try putting your question to the 
Info-PMDF mailing list.

You say you've migrated your users to PMDF MessageStore.  You don't say what 
operating system so I'll assume it's still OpenVMS (and it might not matter, 
anyway).

I can think of a couple of ways to generate a "new mail" alert.

1.  Your PMDF configuration will have a msgstore channel which delivers mail 
to the MessageStore.  You could use the SCRIPT channel to intercept messages 
heading to MessageStore; the SCRIPT channel will run an arbitrary DCL 
command for you.  The command has access to the mail envelope headers and 
the RFC822 headers.  (It's a bit like DELIVER in that regard.)

2.  Instead of using the SCRIPT channel, set up a mapping in the PMDF 
Mapping File which is activated for all messages which are about to go into 
the MessageStore.  The mapping will invoke a your code (written as a 
shareable image) to do what you want.

Option 1 is easy to set up but in my experience is not very efficient, 
particularly when the message sizes get above a few MB.  (I'm currently 
testing a fix for this.)

Option 2 requires more work but will be very efficient.  However it will 
only have access to the recipient and sender envelope headers; it won't have 
access to the Subject or any other RFC822 header for that matter.

Contact me privately if you want help with either of the above.

Both of the above will allow you to detect a message arriving in the user's 
mailbox in real time.  I don't know off-hand how you will communicate that 
information to the user's PC.

Regards,

	Jeremy Begg
	PMDF consultant



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 **