About OmniBiff
The goal of OmniBiff is to create a universal "biff" program, able to monitor multiple mailboxes of any type (including internet email accounts). It is written in Java and released under the GNU General Public License, providing an easily extendable framework to facilitate the addition of new "bifflets" to monitor new types of mail servers, and new types of "skins" for displaying mailbox status. Please see the sourceforge project page for more information. This project is currently in beta and I'd appreciate feedback as to whether or not this works on your system.
OmniBiff currently supports MBOX (UNIX) mail, POP3 servers, IMAP4 servers, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Excite, Go, ZipLip, and LycosMail.
There are three ways to use OmniBiff:
- Native Mode
This displays email status in a native Java window. Each mailbox appears as a small LED that changes color based on email status.
- External Clients
External clients can be written for OmniBiff that display status in something other than a Java window. A WindowMaker applet (wmOmniBiff) and a console program (omnifetch) are included, as well as a C-language library for creating new clients.
- Proxy Mode
OmniBiff can function as a proxy for virtually any other biff-checking program, as long as it can check POP3 accounts. More information is available in the PROXY-HOWTO file.