>at the moment i want to be able to get the "you have new mail" behaviour >in my shell (see "mesg y") that delivermail used to offer me (after >writing into /var/mail/vixie), so i know when to type "inc". but i could >also imagine automating that so that it would fetch synchronously >without polling, and then run my slocal stuff or the modern equivalent. >none of that has worked for me for the last 10 years. and when i hear >you say you want to connect to imap only when and while asked, it means >IDLE won't happen, and i'm not closer to where i want to be. so, for a >lot of small reasons, i'm hoping for an nmh-agent that keeps a >persistent imap connection open.
Well, hm. I would humbly point out that the "you have new mail" shell message, biff, etc etc, have never typically been MH's job. Yes, there is rcvtty, which I kind of thought was odd but it turns out people DO use it but I view that as the exception. But okay, fine. I remember those days as well, and I admit that I wouldn't mind that behavior to work. It just seems complicated to funnel all of the IMAP protocol through a daemon; it seems like a giant pile of code to write and it would be easy to get wrong, and seems like overkill if your REAL goal is to just get a notification when new mail arrives. But ... maybe we could approach this another way. I just looked at RFC 2177, and it seems simple. Like, very simple to implement. I think it would be VERY easy to write a simple tool which just opened a connection to your IMAP server, ran the IDLE command, waited for updates from the IMAP server and simply ran a script when it got new mail, or blasted your tty, or, really did whatever you told it to do. That feels to me like it fits in better with the MH toolbox approach and (more importantly) it seems like something I could actually write before the heat death of the universe :-). So this tool would be the only thing to keep a persistent IMAP connection open; the other tools would still do their thing (or they could talk to a local IMAP caching server if that's what people prefer). I know, you're not a fan of that because you want to keep your password secret. I'm coming from this thinking about something that's implementable in the limited free time I have available; I can't solve all of your problems :-) --Ken _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
