[tpop3d-discuss] whoson protocol

[Chris Elsworth]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:36:27PM +0100, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:21:43PM +0100, Chris Elsworth wrote:
> > 
> > Came across this while randomly browsing, and noticed exim has support
> > for it too.
> > 
> > This would be a really nice clean solution to POP-before-SMTP if it
> > were implemented in tpop3d.
> > 
> > What do others think?
> > 
> > http://whoson.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Presumably the intention is that the POP3 server supplies
> information of this form to the who's on server. The
> protocol supports LOGON and LOGOFF verbs; these would
> presumably be used to correspond to start of session / end
> of session in the POP3 server.
> 
> Does this really work? I thought that typical MUAs such as
> Microsoft Outlook Express sent mail after checking mail,
> rather than simultaneously. Or is the intention that POP3
> servers don't issue LOGOUT commands?

I thought the whoson session was valid for about 10 minutes after the
POP3 LOGOUT signal. The whoson daemon monitors the valid sessions and
expires them after 10 minutes.

> This would be pretty easy to implement-- conceptually it's
> very much like the DRAC stuff which is already in there,
> especially since the WHOSON people supply a library. I'll
> put it on the TODO list; perhaps[1] somebody would like
> to send me a patch against 1.4.2.

I would actually quite like to get a bit more involved in a nice
project like this one, but first of all I need to understand how the
entire existing codebase works, and by the time I've done that someone
will have done the patch :) I'll make it a point one day soon to walk
through the code and figure out how it all works.

-- 
Chris