I guess the alert function is not part of the spec, because it appears to be unimplemented in Dovecot, even though most clients implement it. Timo, I would hope this would be easy to implement, and it's functionality that will be valuable to every installation. Here's why. America recently had the tragedy of a shooting rampage on a large university campus (yes, America should do something about the violence and free access to guns in our culture/society). What was worse was that, due to the lack of an emergency notification process, some 20+ people died needlessly. Now all college and university administration are scrambling to set up emergency notification processes. Our first take on this is a massive all-hands mailing list, but a) best case, it would take 15 minutes (and as much as an hour) to get to everybody's mailbox. b) users would have to read through their mail and stumble on the message What's needed is an "in-your-face" unavoidable alert, and the UWIMAP alert functionality provides this. As I recall, you touch just about anything in your IMAP client and there's a popup message in the middle of the client IMAP window...and it happens repeatedly. We tried it back 3-4 years ago and found it too annoying to use. For this purpose, it's perfect. The wy UWIMAP did it, the presence of the file /etc/imapd.alert triggers it, and the text in that file is transmitted to the client. The message has to be short, a one-liner for a small popup window, but this could be a pointer to a shared system message folder. Of course, DC could sense the activation of the alert in some other fashion that the presence of a file. Ideally, whatever activates the alert function should be able to be turned on remotely; I had in mind to do it using a mail aliases that is a pipe to a executable... What say you? -- ===Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean at bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
On 9/6/2007, Stewart Dean (sdean at bard.edu) wrote:> America recently had the tragedy of a shooting rampage on a large > university campus (yes, America should do something about the > violence and free access to guns in our culture/society). What was > worse was that, due to the lack of an emergency notification process, > some 20+ people died needlessly.Actually, if faculty and students were allowed to legally carry, the bastard probably wouldn't have gotten off more than a few shots... An armed society is a polite society... Tyrants love a disarmed populace... But what this has to do with dovecot is beyond me - please keep political opinions off the list to avoid the kind of flame-fest that this could easily turn into... -- Best regards, Charles
> > America recently had the tragedy of a shooting rampage on a large > university campus (yes, America should do something about the violence > and free access to guns in our culture/society).And since there is computer crime, should computers be banned? The answer to violence is to educate, not legislate. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!
If you want to discuss politics, please contact me directly and off-list. -- ===Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean at bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 09:55 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:> What's needed is an "in-your-face" unavoidable alert, and the UWIMAP > alert functionality provides this.This could be done pretty easily with a plugin overriding mail_storage.sync_init(), checking if we want to do an alert and if we do, call mail_storage_callbacks.notify_ok() with the alert text. I'm not planning on implmenting this myself anytime soon though.. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20070909/4ef02de6/attachment-0002.bin>
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My thanks to Timo. Over here in the US, we just had another college campus shooting, but this time the campus was locked down and no more than the initial two victims were shot (not fatally). Implementing the imap alert function will give our college administration immediate emergency notification to anyone using email. Timo Sirainen wrote:> http://dovecot.org/patches/1.0/imap-alert-plugin.c > >-- ===Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean at bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Stewart Dean wrote:> My thanks to Timo. Over here in the US, we just had another college > campus shooting, but this time the campus was locked down and no more > than the initial two victims were shot (not fatally). > Implementing the imap alert function will give our college > administration immediate emergency notification to anyone using email. > > Timo Sirainen wrote: >> http://dovecot.org/patches/1.0/imap-alert-plugin.c >> >> >I would like to see this as part of the standard dovecot package with some documentation. Is this possible for 1.1? Trever Adams