[Dovecot] alert function, V2

[Stewart Dean]

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?
-- 
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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