[nzlug] Email 'Checker' that supports IMAP Folders

[Nick 'Zaf' Clifford]

Andrew Bruce wrote:
> Does anyone know of an email checking program (like Korn), that when
> setup with an account, can check inside all IMAP folders other than
> just the inbox without having to define every single folder to check?
Yes and no.... :)

I have been configuring an IMAP server for my office. I eventually
settled on Dovecot, because its damn fast, and I have folders with
3000-7000 messages, which is fine if your application does Client side
caching (like Thunderbird), but a problem if you use webmail that
doesn't cache.

I was considering Courier IMAP, which had one very cool feature, you
could configure it to check on ALL IMAP folders, and report changes to
the user via the IDLE command.

I'm not up to speed on the IMAP protocol, so I'm not sure exactly what
the notification methods are and everything, but when I had this option
enabled while testing Courier, I found that when my filter delivered an
email to a folder, Thunderbird was notified immediately (as in within 2
seconds).

The Thunderbird option check mail in all folders (as specified in
another email from you), tells Thunderbird to routinely check each
folder for new messages, which it does by default every 10 minutes (in
theory). Actually for me, it only notices new messages when I hit Get
Mail. The courier advanced idle notices the changes (using the FAM
daemon) instantly and tells the client of them, server push, not client
pull.

If I had a choice, I would have used Courier for that feature alone.
What I really want is the Dovecot authors to implement this advanced
idle command, as I like Dovecot for many reasons :)

To your original question...
Well, if you were using Courier, maybe a standard biff program would use
the IDLE command and notice new emails in other folders if you enabled
the functionality.... Not sure though, so I don't really answer your
question :)

Nick