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@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035