Getting IDLED working for instantanous mail notification

[JasonHeiser]

All of our users are accustomed to knowing instantly when they have new mail, a la Outlook on Exchange. They don’t need to check their mail at all because the Exchange server notifies their Outlook client.

Now that I’m replacing our Exchange server with the mail services of Panther Server, I’m expecting our users to complain that their e-mail is now “delayed.” As I understand it, Cyrus supports the IDLE command for notifying mail clients of new mail, and the IDLED daemon is part of the Cyrus distribution itself. But for reasons unknown to me, Apple omitted the IDLED daemon in Panther Server.

Does anybody have the IDLED daemon compiled as a binary they could share with me? I’m not savvy enough to compile Cyrus with all its various dependencies…

[Anonymous]

Chatter Email for the Treo also uses IDLE for “push email…” anyone know how to contact anyone on the Tiger Server team to put in requests for this? They are reaching the end of the line, but asking them to compile in more Cyrus standard features (like a delivery/lmtpd that support plus addressing) would seem like a good idea.

Alex

[Anonymous]

Grab the source from opensource.apple.com. If you aren’t looking to upgrade the application, then using the version from Apple’s Darwin open source repository is usually pretty straightforward. You then apply the same patches.

Building one additional application that they forgot shouldn’t be TOO bad, and if you use their build process, you keep the same install directories, etc.

Alex

[Anonymous]

Panther server uses Cyrus for mail delivery that supports pop and imap. I do not know about an IDLE-deamon, but you can check yourself that Cyrus supports the IDLE command if you use IMAP:
telnet server 143
server: Connected to server
Escape character is ‘^]’.
* OK server Cyrus IMAP4 v2.1.13 server ready
a001 capability
server: * CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+
MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS ID
NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND SORT
THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES IDLE
STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN AUTH=CRAM-MD5
a001 OK Completed

I use this with chattermail to instantly receive new messages on my palm treo. The client must support the IMAP4 IDLE command (see rfc2177). Entourage on the Mac has an option (‘Live sync’) that enables this. I don’t think Mail.app supports it and do not have a outlook available here.

[Anonymous]

Hmm, my formatting was destroyed. The commands you havee tot type in order to find the capabilities of the imap server are:

‘telnet server 143’ and ‘a001 capability’

[Anonymous]

Man, it must be that I worked too hard last week. I reread the question and now understand that you just want IDLED to work for use of the IDLE command. So my reply is probably not of much use to you.

At least I found that the IDLE command works without having IDLED. I think Cyrus uses polling, but the use of IDLED is probably less processor intensive.

[Author]

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