Re: [exim] announce delivery

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 04:27:34PM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> The very ancient Unix way of announcing email is called "comsat". It is
> implemented by a daemon to which the mailer sends a message (using UDP).
> The daemon then writes "you have mail" to the user's terminal if she/he
> is logged in. Exim has support for comsat - check the "notify_comsat"
> option of appendfile. If you were to write a replacement daemon that
> accepted comsat-style messages, Exim can already support you.

Using comsat to transmit not a login name, but a mail address, may
stretch the "specification", because the format is "login@offset".
There is only one "@" and the recipient is assumed to have access to the
mailbox in mbox format. I am curious if your question may has been the
first time comsat has been mentioned on this list in the 21st century. :-)

Currently, the Sieve WG works on a notify extension framework, using URIs
as notification targets. There is already some alpha code for Exim to use
mailto: URIs. That way, the user can decide which mails are considered
important enough to trigger a notification. It's not as perfect,
because the notification will be sent when Exim processes a message,
not after it has filed it, but it is way more flexible. You could send
a notification and then forward the message to a different address.

Michael