Subject: mail notification

From: Eran Lachs <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 13:01:51 +0200 (IST)

Hello,

   Our environment consists a Decstation running as the mail-server (where
all user's mailboxes live). It runs imapd and has Pine locally installed.
Pine is installed on all other servers ("satellite" machines) and is
well-behaved. I loved the idea of not mounting the mail spool directory.
Our users like it a lot. I've been asked to implement mail notification. 
I have two unresolved problems:
(i) Notifying a user logging on to a "satellite" machine that he/she has
    new mail on the mail-server.
(ii) Notifying a user working on a "satellite" machine upon arrival of new mail
     to his/her mailbox on the mail-server.

Anybody tackled this ?  Thanks in advance for any info.

Eran Lachs   ([email-masked])
Ben Gurion University Computation Center
Beer Sheva, Israel

---

From: Andy Poling <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 09:50:14 -0500

> Anybody tackled this ?  Thanks in advance for any info.

Yes and no.  He have a similar environment - tightly coupled cluster of
workstations with a fileserver.

I have solved (ii) above by running a modified comsat daemon on the fileserver
which forwards the comsat requests it receives to each workstation on the
cluster.  It didn't take much code and works simply and reliably.  I can
provide the modified comsat code to anybody who is interested.

As for (i) - I have the mail spool mounted around because not everybody wants
to use pine anyway here...

-Andy

Andy Poling                              Internet: [email-masked]
UNIX Systems Programmer                  Bitnet: ANDY@JHUNIX
Homewood Academic Computing              Voice: (410)516-8096    
Johns Hopkins University                 UUCP: uunet!mimsy!aplcen!jhunix!andy