[plug] fetchmail alternative

[Bernard Blackham]

(Don't think this went through the first time round. If it did,
apologies for a double post)

Plug,

I have an idea and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on it...

I want a solution to retrieve my mail from multiple email accounts
without the need for polling. Rather a daemon sitting on a machine
(either the actual mail server or a machine with /var/spool/mail nfs
mounted) would go tell my machine that there's new mail to fetch
from there and it'd go fetch it (with fetchmail probably).

To complicate the matter, my machine (laptop) roams, so it has
different IP addresses through the day. So the process would go
along the lines of:

  1) When my laptop fires up a network connection somewhere, it
  posts its ip address into a file on a server somewhere.

  2) A daemon starts up on my machine listening on a certain port
  for connections from the notification daemons running on other
  machines actually receiving mail
  
  3) When mail arrives at a remote mail server, the notification
  daemon there goes off to look up my current IP address from the
  predetermined file on a server and informs the daemon there that
  there's mail on server X.  (security to be considered)

  4) The daemon on my machine runs fetchmail to get the new mail
  from only that machine and goes back to sleep till next time.

Does anybody know of such a system already? Does anybody find
themselves in the same position of polling several mailservers every
minute or 5 minutes all day and would like to see such a system?
I'll put together my own if I can't find something I can adapt.

I know I could simply forward all the email from the various
accounts to a single address, but that has its own issues and is
less fun :) I'm open any to suggestions.

TIA,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au
 Australian Linux Technical Conference 2003: http://www.linux.conf.au/
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