monitoring an email address

Question

I'm hoping for an event based way to know when I get an email. Right now I'm using gmail but the email host isn't critical. Do I really have to poll it?

Answer 1

If you connect to gmail using IMAP, you should be able to use the IDLE command. Gmail's IMAP server does support IDLE.

Answer 2

RFC 5465 proposes a NOTIFY extension to IMAP. It is unlikely that many servers implement it, though.

Answer 3

I've had bad luck with IDLE on both GMAIL and on Dreamhost (which uses courier). Exchange does a great job with IDLE though: I see mailbox updates in less than a second.

Without good IDLE support, yes, you need to poll.

Answer 4

You could forward the mail to a *nix host that uses .forward files, then pipe the mail to a script that handles raising the event in your program (by pinging a URL, etc.)

Here's an example in a CPanel/PHP environment: http://kb.siteground.com/article/How%5Fto%5Fpipe%5Fan%5Femail%5Fto%5Fa%5FPHP%5Fscript.html