On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, Rasmus Tamstorf wrote:
In order not to have to scan all my mail frequently I am hoping that this
utility can be made by having procmail call the utility every time it
delivers a mail. Using information about which folder the mail has been
delivered to the utility can then update the counters, and I can see it in
a window in a corner of my desktop without having to type mailstat all the
time.
My questions are therefore :
1) Is there already such a utility out there ?
If you have the time, inclination and apptitude:
You could use something like zephyr. Procmail could send a zephyr
gramm declaring it has deliverd email. Zephyr gramms have tupples
to determine which massage chanel the message goes so you could use
username.mail.folder as the tupple where username is your account name
to keep it personal, mail is just that the word mail or procmail if
you like, and folder is set to what ever folder the emssage was
delivered in the body of the message could include the message headers
should you wish to obtain more information.
Then all you need is a little program to listen for zephyr gramms on
the tupples matching the mail folders you are intersted in. It can
then keep a score of new mail that has arrived since it started.
For more advanced feature you could get it to scan your mail folders
when its start to determine how many read and unread mail you have
and you the zephyr grams to keep track of new mail. I don't how you
can keep track of the read mail status without rescan the mailbox
or altering you email client to send a zephyr gramm to indicate a
message had been read. For that you may want a tupples such as:
username,newmail.folder and username.readmail.folder .
2) Is it possible to tell procmail to pass delivery information on to some
other process ? And if so, how ?
see above
3) [This is possibly not a procmail question, but anyway ...] How can you
tell the difference between an unread and an unseen message in a
folder ? (i.e. how does pine know which folders to stop at when
tabbing ?)
It stops at all files marked as New and keeps a record of which ones
it has seen so as not to stop there should it wrap back round to it.
If you close pine and restart it I believe it will stop at ALL of
the messages Marked new again.
--Sean