Juan Asensio Sánchez schreef:

Hi

What is the best option to notify a user that a message has arrived? The intention is to write a script that connects to a jabber server and checks if the user is online, so then a message is sent to user notifying him that he has received a new message. The solution should be compatible with Sieve filtering, so the script should not be executed when the message is moved to the SPAM folder, or pass to the script an argument specifying the folder where the message has been saved.

In an ideal world, the best option would be using the Sieve notify extension with the xmpp (jabber) notify method. The Sieve community is working on devising a new set of standards to achieve exactly what you describe:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-notify-12.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-notify-xmpp-09.txt

However, although I am currently implementing support for notify/mailto in the new Sieve plugin (to match cmusieve), I have no specific plans to implement notify/xmpp in the near future. So, this is not directly of much use to you. Maybe if it turns out to be really easy, I'll build a plugin in my spare time.

For now, indeed, you will for instance have to write some sort of wrapper script for deliver that sends notifications and duplicates some of the tests that Sieve already performs in order to prevent notifying SPAM messages. Alternatively, you could define a special (internal!) mail address in the SMTP server that calls your notification script as pipe transport. Then you can redirect messages from your Sieve script to that mail address (e.g. user+notify@host.com) if you want to send notifications. Still not very pretty though and potentially insecure if you are not very careful. How to achieve this second alternative precisely is a bit beyond me, as I am not that experienced in setting up SMTP services.

Regards,

-- Stephan Bosch stephan@rename-it.nl