Re: Rolling in sidebar, other mutt-ng type bits?
Now here's a weird thing. I'm using mutt 1.5.18 right now (on ubuntu 8.10) to
read my gmail account over imap, I don't have the sidebar patch installed, and
I'm finding that if I press 'y' I get taken to a list of all my imap folders
(these have not been listed by me in the muttrc, mutt is finding them itself on
the imap server) and beside each folder it's telling me how many unread mails
are in the folder. What the? Since when was mutt able to do this?
Here's a screenshot:
http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/2584/muttrk6.png
(Take a look at that mail volume by the way, and you'll see why some of the
earlier suggestions such as pressing '.' or 'c' then return would not work for
me).
I've attached my muttrc file, not sure which part of it (if any) is enabling
this feature, but there you go. It does exactly what I was looking for when I
was trying to use the sidebar patch and asking what other people do, I just
didn't know mutt could do this.
Regarding the biff programs that someone mentioned ... I went looking for linux
mail notification programs. There are many out there, most of which look
rubbish, there's a few funny ones too, such as opening a cd tray when new mail
arrives, or flashing keyboard LEDs when new mail arrives.
In short, I settled on gnubiff for my non-gmail accounts that do not have lots
of folders, I didn't find any that could handle my gmail account, with the
large number of folders. To be useful it would have to at least present me a
list of all the folders and how many unread mails in each, without me having to
tell it about every folder one by one, and nothing can do that. But mutt is now
doing that for me so it doesn't matter. There are a large number of
gmail-specific mail notifiers out there for linux that I did not look at though
(I was looking for imap ones).
For my non-gmail accounts which do not have a large number of different folders
or a high-volume of email, I found that gnubiff works best, it does the job
nicely, although it's not perfect. It's nice to have a program that runs in the
background and just tells me if I have mail, so I don't have to keep opening my
mail client to check.
Gnubiff and mail-notification seem to be the two main choices. Here's a
comparison in case anyone's interested:
Both of these programs use what seems a bizarrely huge amount of memory for
what they do -- almost 10mb, when they're just sitting there waiting to check
email.
gnubiff http://gnubiff.sourceforge.net/
- Works as a gnome panel applet, in a system tray (gnome or compatible) or as a
GTK standalone window.
- Keeps its configuration in a single ~/.gnubiffrc file.
- Has a cute icon and new-mail sound.
- The configuration dialog does not feel very nice, it's one of those gnome/gtk
apps that doesn't quite feel like a gnome app. But worse, it doesn't work.
Not exactly reassuring. On my first several tries it just kept ignoring me
when I added my imap account. Eventually I did get it to work, by a
combination of manually editing the config file and using the GUI.
- Once configured it does actually work, for both my home and mail accounts,
including autodetecting and using ssl. So it does the jon just fine.
- It can tell you how many unread mails are in each configured account, and
show you the subject line, from header, etc. for each mail.
Mail Notification http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/
- It works as a system tray icon only, so should work outside of gnome as long
as you have a gnome-compatible system tray.
- The configuration dialog is a lot nicer than gnubiff, feels right and
actually works.
- The popup messages it shows when new mails arrive are much nicer than
gnubiffs (it's using the newer gnome notifications system).
- Unfortunately mail-notification itself does not work for either of my
imap accounts, it worked for the first test only, after that it never shows
me any notification of new mails, and for my work account that requires ssl
it simply says it cannot login.
- In gnubiff if you want to force it to check for new mail right now you
just click on the gnubiff icon. Since mail-notification shows no icon when
there's no new mail you can't do this, so if you want to force it to check for
mail, you have to run mail-notification -u in a terminal (which doesn't
work, in line with mail-checking in general not working).
There's a long list of more linux mail-notification programs here, but nothing
that looks more promising than the above two:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Internet/Mail/Notification/index.shtml
This Python script for checking email through the system monitor tool conky
looks promising:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869771
For now I think I'm content with gnubiff and its cutesiness.