Linux is a great solution to share a computer between some users. Each user is confined in its user space. Others users cannot nor break the system, nor break its files. Much more, system configuration are done once and for each users. For example, internet access is configured on /etc/ files and any autorized user can bring up the link.
This is particularly interesting for a computer shared between members of a family. In such configuration, the computer is usely connected to Internet via a simple dialup connection. ADSL technology will probably broke this report, but for now it's probably true for lot's of people. In such familly, each people have its own email, and propably more than one account. The problem for this familly is to collect all emails, for everyone. Email is really light traffic (something like a single minute by day/week for downloading simple emails for one person). The worse configuration was that each users of the computer have to login and bring up the link for its own emails.
Fetchmail (fetchmaild on Debian) is a great solution for this familly. It permits to collect multiple account and distribute each collected email in the corresponding local user. By this way, when the PPP link is bring up (ie to search a recipe ;-), fetchmail download transparently the emails, without disturbing the user.
The problem is that there is no simple way for the user to understand if the download is complete or not. An approximative solution is to have a look at the modem leds. An other way is to look at the /var/log/mail.log, but this is for experimented users.
The aim of FetchmailMonitor is to solve this problem by furnishing applets to easily understand the state of the email fetching processus.
Please consult the Freshmeat project page.
2003-09-17: FetchmailMon 0.2 has been released.
A new tool based on 'dialog' tool propose a graphical
progression bar.
Any help appreciate for any other desktop (Gnome, KDE, ...).
2003-09-16: FetchmailMon 0.1 has been released.
For now it's quite simple (trivial?).
I hope making simple applets (X11, WindowMaker) soon.
Any help appreciate for any other desktop (Gnome, KDE, ...).
FetchmailMonitor will be distributed under the GPL (GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE).
Please download from Savannah project filelist.
Soon.
For now, simply send me an email.
Thanks to Savannah site for hosting this project.
Thanks to FreshMeat site for hosting the news of this project.
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Last modified: $Date: 2003/09/22 20:11:38 $
