Questions on fud and notifyd

[Eric Ewanco]

Etienne Goyer wrote:

>But I would still like to know what noifyd is about.  
>
>  
>
>>Also, I was just wondering what is the purpose of notifyd.  I read the
>>man page but I am still mystified.  I am just wondering if it would be
>>of any use in my setup.
>>    
>>
notifyd allows users to be notified, via various mechanisms, that they 
have new mail.  Specifically, it runs on each new mail message and 
reports, via one of several possible mechanisms, things such as the 
message's to, from, subject, and mailbox.  It apparently is also used by 
Sieve to send email notifications.

notifyd is basically analogous to Unix biff (technically, comsat).

As distributed I did not find notifyd very useful, since the only two 
mechanisms it supports for regular mail (i.e. not sieve notifications) 
is log and zephyr, and log is only useful for testing and I don't run 
zephyr (which is something like instant messaging).  So I gutted the 
zephyr code and implemented something more like biff, or actually, more 
like the comsat I had previously revamped, which prints out messages 
like this in your terminal window when you get email:

Mail from owner-info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu Re: Questions on fud and 
notify

... in ANSI color, too.

If anyone wants the code let me know.  It's may not be suitable for 
public use -- I couldn't find a way around hacking notifyd to be suid 
root because it has to be able to write to terminals  -- but it's 
something.  It requires changes to lmtpd.c as well as notifyd.c and 
notify_zephyr.c.

Eric