xbiff-like program to monitor remote mailbox?

Mon Nov 19 13:43:11 PST 2007

This may well be a self-inflicted wound, but I'd kinda like to find a
reasonably elegant way around it regardless....

I've managed to acquire the habit (for work) of running mutt(1) on my
desktop, but configuring mutt to access the IMAP4 server through an SSH
tunnel.  (Were I to merely run mutt(1) on the machine where the  IMAP4
server is running, this would not be an issue -- but there would be other
issues I'd rather avoid.)  [Oh -- and courtesy of a suggestion from Rick
Moen, I run mutt(1) from within screen(1), which is definitely handy --
especially since the display & keyboard I use for access to nearly
everything is the set on my laptop.)

This has generally worked pretty well for the last couple of years;
indeed, I've become rather a fan of doing things via SSH tunnels.

One of the things that made this approach relatively palatable despite
the hysteresis mutt(1) exhibts with respectto noticing changes in the
mailbox has been that the machine where IMAP4 was running also happened
to have some miscellaneous bits & pieces of X11 installed on it: enough
that I was able to run xbiff(1) on the machine and have it display back
to wherever I was (which was usually on my laptop).

Over the weekend, we did a "forklift upgrade" to the machine where IMAP4
was running, and while the hardware & software are all shiny now, one of
the  "casualties" was that we deliberately decided that there wasn't
really enough need to have X11 stuff installed on a headless
rack-mounted box in a data center to warrant the additional
complication.

As a result, no xbiff(1) any more.

This isn't catastrophic -- I think I was the only one to use it,
and since I was the one responsible for implementing the upgrade...
well, you get the picture.  :-}

I've looked around at various {x,}biff-like programs, but each seems to
want to look at a local file-like object, and the ones that can flip
X-based widgets around tend (for some odd reason) to require X
libraries, at least.

I think what I want is something that can run on a system that supports
X, but that has a somewhat more general way to determine the salient
attributes of a mailbox (which may well reside on a remote machine).

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Proprietary data formats obfuscate, rather than disseminate, information.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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