I am looking for a way to check an email account and have those messages automatically be turned into instant messages. We use nagios and solar winds and those programs send email alerts for monitoring equipment at our local and remote offices and such. As we have people in our office 24/7 it would be really beneficial if I could make it an IM for them to see the alert come through. The people that are in the office however do not have direct internet access as they are in a secured network. I was wondering if someone has made an app that could do this (check the mail and change it to an IM). Or some kind of plugin that I could run from the server that sends email alerts to a certain person or a group if the whole message can’'t be changed into an IM.
Definitely a cool idea, and this sounds like a perfect Wildfire plugin. Sending the email’'s as IM messages is probably a great start. Longer-term, the service could be based on pubsub. Have you considered sponsoring development of the plugin by one of the Wildfire community members? The Version2Software (http://www.version2software.com) guys have a lot of great plugin experience and write custom software, as an example.
maybe you can configure your mail server to launch a small Smack-based client to do this or use a unix .forward file to launch such a client to send an IM and also forward the email to your support.
I presume you have already looked into this, but you can certainly make Nagios use Jabber/XMPP for notifications and skip the email-to-IM transformation in that case:
For nagios I got it to send xmpp notifications, but we have other tools that I needed this for, namely Solar Winds and now Tripwire. I got a price from a developer and it was reasonable, but my boss hates spending money and was like “keep looking for something that doesn’'t cost anything”.
If your mail server is on Unix and you use procmail or something like it, I wrote a perl script to do just what you describe. It takes a mail message, and sends it to a jabber account. If you are interested, let me know I can send it to you.
