I used to have an email account with my mobile provider who offered free SMS notification. It was brilliant when it worked but it was flaky and unreliable. Then I changed my email host and lost the SMS notification altogether. Now I want it back. I had a brainstorm with myself and came up with some ideas, based on dedicating a spare N900 for the job.

1. Using the N900 as a mail server
This would be the preferred method. I could stash it somewhere in the corner of the garage and use it as a mail/web server. If I find a suitably large external hard drive that it could manage to operate, then I could also use it as a NAS. The condition is that I could run a daemon on it to detect unread emails and send an SMS to a dedicated number.

Question: What mail server applications do people use on the N900?
Do they use any? Needless to say, the search did not reveal anything.

2. Using the N900 as a mail watchdog
Another idea, use the N900 as it is, sitting quietly in the garage or the loft, checking unread emails on an external server like the one I am using now, and tweaking something like Maenotify to send an SMS. This is less favourable than option 1 since the phone would be doing only one job which feels like a waste.

3. Err...
Any other ideas?

Note: In the light of the upcoming Neo900, the option 1 is definitely the most attractive. I could use just the main board and reuse the housing, camera and SD card holder for the Neo900.

I use dovecot, but only for locally serving IMAP to either Modest or alpine. The actual retrieving of e-mail (for now only from gmail) is via mbsync (using IMAP).

(for completeness, the sending is handled directly -- and independently -- by modest and alpine. you/one could also use e.g. msmtp for this).

Using mbsync (which synchronizes your IMAP account locally using Maildir format), you can easily find/parse the new messages by looking at $MAILDIR/new (once you read them they will be moved to $MAILDIR/cur).

Then you just send an SMS using dbus (never done it, don't know off the top of my head how, but I'm sure it can be done).

If you do the above + use dovecot as e-mail server for your local network then your N900 will be more useful

Plus it could do a bunch of other NAS'sy things such as serving as a backup server using rsync, etc.