Given gmail isn't always available these days for whatever reason(s) I'm wondering how best to regularly monitor gmail servers so users would know if the servers are alive when they use mutt to connect and do mail transactions. Probably putting something into mutt would not be feasible. I don't know if any other light-weight command line solutions for this type of monitoring are already available since I've had no occasion to do it yet.
When people state they cannot recieve email with a stable version of mutt and it not being all that long ago gmail was down and that got on the news an ability to monitor services would seem to be useful. The gmail monitoring should only be attempted once it's established a network connection exists since if you haven't got a network certainly no service on the network will work. --
