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TechNotify
What is TechNotify?

TechNotify is a Macintosh application which periodically checks to see whether or not a user has new electronic mail.

While most Macintosh mail clients (such as Eudora) are capable of automatically checking for email, these applications use the POP "stat" command, which is very time consuming and slows down the user's post office server. On a heavily loaded mail server, such as those at MIT, using the automatic email checking feature of Eudora has a negative impact on the user experience.

To solve this problem, TechNotify uses a lightweight protocol to contact a special server running on the user's post office server. If the user has mail, it can either notify the user or tell Eudora to incorporate the new mail. Thus a user can automatically receive mail (or be notified of new mail) without negatively impacting mail server performance and their own experience.

Where do I get TechNotify?

Download the current release version: TechNotify 1.2

The beta version of TechNotify 2.0 will be available soon.

What is TechNotify 2.0?

As part of the testing process for the new Open Transport Sockets Library, we have been working on a new multi-threaded PowerPlant version of TechNotify. This version doubles as a test of the UDP support in the Sockets Library and as a sample application for how to write PowerPlant apps using the multi-threaded support in MIT Support Library.

As a result, we have written documentation explaining how TechNotify 2.0 works:

Questions or comments? Send mail to macdev@mit.edu
Last updated on $Date: 2003/11/18 21:59:27 $
Last modified by $Author: smcguire $