[olug] COMSAT?

[Nick Walter]

If the win32 machines have winpopup (for win95/98) or the messenger
service (same thing for NT I believe), you could use samba to have the
linux box broadcast winpopup notification messages to all the win32
clients.  The man page for smbclient will explain the exact details for
sending such messages.  

If I was to do something along those lines, I'd imagine I'd just slap a
shell script into the crontab to check for new e-mail every 10 minutes
or so, and then spawn the notification via 'smbclient -M'.  This
solution, based on shell scripts, is quite flexible and allows a lot of
customization for individual needs.  The popup could contain the subject
line from the e-mail, or the time it arrived, or both, or the
presence/absence of attachments, etc.

Nick Walter


On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 14:48, William E. Kempf wrote:
> Anyone know anything about Comsat/Biff?  In particular, I'd like to have a
> "new mail" notification program running on Win32 boxes that could notify me
> of new mail on my Linux mailbox with out having to do an expensive poll.  I
> found a package that claims to do this, NotifyMail
> (http://www.notifymail.com/nmdocumentation/index.htm), but can't get it to
> work.  With "biff y" executed I get notifications on the linux box (though
> the output is basically empty, probably because comsat/biff doesn't
> understand Maildir formats?), but nothing from NotifyMail.  If there was
> some documentation for Comsat/Biff that described the protocol I'd even be
> willing to write my own notification program, but I'm finding it difficult
> to find useful information about this anywhere.
> 
> Or is there a better way to achieve what I want?
> 
> Bill Kempf
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>