popit.tcl
 
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Description Usage Requirements
Screen Shots Key Bindings Todo List

Description

popit.tcl helps you keep up with your email... no matter where you are (it does for me at least).  It actually is a simple mail forwarding application.  You can tell it about a number of POP3 accounts to poll and let it run like a daemon.  When new mail comes into these accounts it will forward a notification to another email address.  Why all this trouble?  Well, I like getting paged on my cel phone when I have new mail.

The real value is that the notification sent is tuned to be palatable for wireless devices.  popit.tcl truncates the message headers and even sends the first bit of the message body in SmallTalk convention... eleminating the need for spaces.

On top of all of that, if your phone or pager cand send mail... you can administrate popit.tcl remotely.  You can send administrative commands to popit.tcl to have it stop sending notifications, to send you the body of any message and to even send you help on administrative commands.

Screen Shots

Main window
Pref window

Usage

The most important part of using popit.tcl is setting the preferences correctly.  Upon startup, popit.tcl presents a text widget with some instruction and a button with the name of a mythical mail server on it.  Clicking on the button will allow you to set preferences for mail forwarding.

The prefs do the following:

state->on toggle operation of forwarding and message handling for all accounts
state->active toggle forwarding for all accounts... message handling will still be active so administrative actions can still take place
delay->delay set the delay between each poll of all accounts in minutes
pop3 login->username set the username for this POP3 account
pop3 login->password set the password for this POP3 account
pop3->hostname set the hostname for the POP3 account
pop3->port set the port for the POP3 account
smtp->hostname set the hostname for the SMTP (outbound) host... this host will be used to relay the forwarded messages
smtp->port set the port for the SMTP host
forwarding->fwd to address set the address notification should be sent to
forwarding->fwd from address set the address that notification should appear to be from
stats->number of messages number of messages waiting on the POP3 account... read only
stats->last check at last time POP3 account was polled

If you read the information in the text widget in the main window you might want to create a file $HOME/popitcfg.tcl.  This file can contain Tcl code to create one or more accounts to monitor.  Just pattern off of the example in the text widget for one account and duplicate the 3 lines of script for each additional account to monitor.  This file can also reset or append to a variable called "ignores", which contains a list of mail header fields to match text against in order to ignore certain mail.  For instance:

set ignores { { "From: *" { payton pwhite netflix } }
     { "To: *" { info-viskit } }
     { "Sender: *" { info-viskit } }
     { "CC: *" { info-viskit } } }
Note: Be careful about putting the options for username and password in your $HOME/popitcfg.tcl file.  If someone gets read access to this file you will have given away some potentially important info, eh?

The administrative messages allow you to configure the behavior of popit.tcl remotely.  The administrative messages are as follows:

.ad get help message back
.ad on makes all accounts active
.ad off makes all accounts inactive
.ad clr clear the current notification list... useful just before reactiviting account that might have a bunch of messages backed up that you don't want to hear about
.ad dly <number> change the polling delay for all  accounts
.ad msg <number> have the body of the nth message sent to you.  The newest message in the account (which includes the administrative message you sent) is the 0th message.

Command Line Args

There are currently no command line arguments.

Key Bindings

<Double-Escape> Exit
<Escape> Cancels preferences dialog

Requirements

Todo List
 
Bugs
General