Sylpheed IMAP IDLE/NOTIFY Plug-in

This is a plugin for the Sylpheed mail client which adds support for the IMAP NOTIFY extension (RFC 5465) and the IMAP IDLE command (RFC 2177). It allows you to receive mail in real time instead of by polling.

IMAP NOTIFY is a successor to IMAP IDLE and allows for getting notifications about more than one mailbox at a time on a single connection, and allows for listening for arbitrary mailbox events. However, it is not widely implemented. (It's author, Arnt Gulbrandsen, said "it should have been good but is a disaster"). However, it is supported by the Dovecot and Archiveopteryx
IMAP servers. This plugin uses NOTIFY if the server supports it, and otherwise tries to use IDLE. With IDLE, only the inbox is watched for new mail.

Features

• Updates folder view and summary view when new mail arrives
• Shows new mail notifications and executes the new mail command (if enabled)

License

GPLv3+

Usage

When installed, the plugin takes effect for any IMAP account once it connects to its server.

Install

Download one of these binaries for your system and put it at ~/.sylpheed-2.0/plugins/:

• imap_notify-1.1.0-linux-amd64.so
• imap_notify-1.1.0-linux-arm64.so
• imap_notify-1.1.0-linux-armhf.so
• imap_notify-1.1.0-linux-i686.so
• imap_notify-1.1.0-linux-powerpc.so

Then restart Sylpheed. Check in the Plug-in manager (under Configuration menu) to see if the IMAP Notify Plug-in is listed.

Development

Compile Sylpheed:

svn checkout svn://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/sylpheed/trunk sylpheed
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

Compile and install the plugin:

cd plugin
git clone ssb://%RwPEGLnQ6b7xNkY3HJCiujzvQC+pPhR4AcDEJb9EYgQ=.sha256 sylpheed-imap-notify
cd sylpheed-imap-notify
make SYLPHEED_DIR=../../
make install

Current issues

• If you start Sylpheed with notifications disabled and then enable them, you will have to restart the application for that setting to take effect in this plugin.

• The plugin only handles new mail notificaions. It does not handle message expunge events, flag changes, mailbox changes, or other events.

• There may be problems with reconnecting to timed-out or disconnected sessions.

Todo

• Add an account preference for using IDLE/NOTIFY or not
• Show fine-grained updates without having to reload the entire message summary view.
• Add internationalization
• Filter new messages in INBOX if that preference is enabled

Why a plugin

The LibSylph IMAP4 client implementation is synchronous. When IMAP NOTIFY/IDLE is used, notifications could arrive at any time. This would require significant changes to LibSylph's IMAP code. This plugin uses a workaround of having a second IMAP session for the asynchronous events, so that the core IMAP code is left untouched.