Michał Łomnicki

tl;dr

irssi-email-mentions is an irssi plugin which mails you when somebody mentions you.

irssi-email-mentions

I love using IRC. I use it to chat with geeks around the world and with fellow devs at Arkency.

My setup is pretty typical - Irssi running under screen on VPS. This way I’m connected 24/7 so all conversations are logged and anyone can leave me a message.

However this approach has one drawback. I don’t receive a notification when I’m away from the keyboard for a while and somebody mentions me.

Hipchat has solved this issue pretty well. They detect if you’re away and if so they send you an mail saying that someone wants to talk with you.

Of course I badly needed this feature in my irssi. There were some solutions like irssi-notify-io but none of them fit into my requirements. So I rolled out my own irssi plugin.

How does it work?

You’re mailed when somebody mentions you (or when your nick appears in the message)

  <bob> mlomnicki: are you there?

You’re mailed when a message is send to everyone on the channel

  <bob> all: what's your favourite IRC client?

You’re mailed when somebody sends you a private message

  <bob> /query mlomnicki
  <bob> mlomnicki: It was a damn good party yesteday!

The code is available on github (warning: written in Perl).

When does it send a notification?

Of course it would be annoying if you were mailed everytime somebody mentions you. You may be focused on the conversation so there is no need to send any notifications. The plugins gives you some time to respond. By default it’s 2 minutes but you can adjust it to you needs. Check README. If you don’t respond within 2 minutes it assumes you’re away and mails you. In fact, you don’t have to respond. It’s enough if you switch to Irssi and press any key.

Feedback

This works for me. If you have any ideas how to make this plugin better don’t be shy and leave me a comment or report an issue on github.