Getting my email LED working with Outlook/GMail

March 5, 2008 9:07 AM

I am trying to get the Email Indicator LED on my Acer Aspire laptop working with GMail and/or Outlook 2007. The easiest way seems to be with some sort of POP emulator/pass-through.

Other than accessing the LED directly (there seems to be some work on this in linux - http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/), the laptop came with "Launch Manager" software, which will check a pop server every x seconds, and flash the LED if and when there is a new email waiting.

My problems with this are:
1) Most importantly, the program is limited to POP3 access, without any SSL/TLS support, and without the ability to change the port number.

2) It can only check one pop account (I have 2, plus an IMAP and GMail, the last 2 being the important ones)

3) When outlook fetches the mail, which it does every two minutes, the light will clear. If I set outlook to leave messages on the server, the light will remain on after I have read them.


So, I need this program to access something, looking like a regular POP server, which can tell it there are new messages if there are unread messages, and that there are not if there are not. I assume the easiest way would be to use GMail as the "master" account, but I am not sure.

At my disposal, I have:
- a laptop, running Vista Business and Outlook 2007 and is effectively always on
- a (well, 2) linux-based, always-on server, with Sendmail installed and configured and no GUI installed.

I can't seem to find any "fake" POP servers, let alone anything that will provide the pass-through needed.

Thanks for reading, and for any help!

posted by d7415 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Wow, that's a pretty tall order. I doubt you'll find purpose-built software to do this, since it seems like a pretty esoteric thing - there are lots of mail checkers, but I can't find any that expose the result via POP3. What I can tell you is that POP3 is a dead simple protocol to write a server for, and that many languages have libraries for POP, IMAP, and Gmail API clients, so depending on your experience, it would probably be an afternoon or two of programming.

That said, I hope someone comes by and proves me wrong about the purpose-built software!
posted by pocams at 9:47 AM on March 5, 2008

FreePOPS may help.
posted by tra at 11:21 AM on March 5, 2008