New Mail Notifications via Instant Messaging
Posted on March 7th, 2005
For the longtest time I've wanted my IM client to tell me when I receive new email. I figured Jabber was the best way to do that, but then I started running into the petty details. Triggering the notifications from procmail was complicated (Pipe to stdin? Must make sure stdout is the same as stdin? What?). Crafting the notification was also complicated (Handle multipart messages? Ignore attachments? Wha?) You can do it, sure, but it was way more work than I wanted.
Recently I've started looking back at the major IM networks like AIM and Yahoo Messenger, partly because they are a lot simpler to get up and running. More importantly, they both offer new mail notifications. As far as I can tell, this feature isn't available when you set up transports between your Jabber server and either AIM or Yahoo-- I only discovered it when I started connecting directly through Gaim. But suddenly the notification problem isn't such a problem if you forward your mail the right way.
Here's the setup: Mail comes into your account and eventually gets filtered through procmail. I'm already using a Gmail account as an off-site email backup, so every incoming message gets CCd over there. But that could just as easily be a Yahoo mail account. You still read your mail as usual, but you're using Yahoo messenger for notifications. And you get an offsite backup out of the deal. Or you could CC your mail to Gmail, then set up a forwarding rule to Yahoo. It's not so much the complexity of the route that's important as the fact that Yahoo is the end point.
Unlike the Jabber approach, you don't have a lot of customization options. Then again let's not make this any more complicated than it has to be, you know?