Newmail
is a program to allow monitoring of mailboxes in an intelligent
fashion. It is based loosely on biff(1) and the version
of newmail that was distributed with Elm 1.7.
The basic operation is that the program will check the list of
specified mailboxes each interval seconds and will list
any new mail that has arrived in any of the mailboxes,
indicating the sender name, and the subject of the message.
Each entry displayed can be in a number of different formats
depending on the mode of the program, the number of folders
being monitored, and the status of the message. If you're
running it as a window (e.g. ``-w''
or invoked as wnewmail) then the output will be
similar to:
sender name - subject of message
Priority: sender name - subject of message
where <sender name> is either the name of the person sending it,
if available (the ARPA 'From:' line) or some other brief
indication of origin. If you are the sender, <sender name> will be
replaced by "to <recipient name>". If there
is no subject, the message "<no subject>" will appear on
the screen.
Folders are indicated by having the folder name appear first
on the output line, as in:
folder: sender name - subject of message
If you're running newmail without the windows option,
then the output is more suitable for popping up on an otherwise
active screen, and will be formatted:
>> New mail from sender name - subject of message
>> Priority mail from sender name - subject of message
Again, with folder names indicated as a prefix.
The flags available are:
-d
This will turn on the debugging, verbose output mode. It is not
recommended that you use this option unless you're interested in
actually debugging the program.
-i interval
This will change the frequency that the program checks the folders
to the interval specified, in seconds. The default interval for
the program is 60 seconds. Note: if you change the interval
to less than 10 seconds, the program will warn you that it isn't
recommended.
-w
Use of the ``-w'' flag will simulate having the program run
from within a window (e.g. the more succinct output format,
and so on). Most likely, rather than using this option you
should be simply invoking wnewmail instead.
File specs are made up of two components, the
folder name and the prefix string, the
latter of which can always be omitted.
The format is foldername=prefixstring, and
you can specify folders by full name, by simply
the name of the user whose mailbox should be
monitored, or by the standard Elm
metacharacters to specify your folder
directory (e.g. ``+'', ``='', or ``%'').
Folders that cannot be opened due to permission mismatches
will cause the program to immediately abort. On the other
hand, files that do not exist will continue to be checked
every interval seconds, so some care should be
exercised when invoking the program.
The program will run until you log out or explicitly kill
it, and can internally reset
itself if any of the folders shrink in size and
then grow again.
The default folder to monitor is always your incoming mailbox.
EXAMPLES
Some example invocations:
$ newmail
will check your incoming mailbox every 60 seconds.
$ newmail -i 15 joe root
will monitor the incoming mailboxes for ``joe'' and ``root'',
checking every 15 seconds for new mail.
$ newmail "mary=Mary" +postmaster=POBOX
will monitor the incoming mailbox for user ``mary'', prefixing
all messages with the string ``Mary'', and the folder in
the users maildir directory called ``postmaster'',
prefixing all of those messages with ``POBOX''.
You can also have more complex monitoring too, for example:
will check every 30 seconds for the users mailbox, a mailbox that
is the users login-name with ``su'' appended (e.g. ``joe'' would
become ``joesu'') and the file /tmp/mbox, prefixing new mail
for each with ``me'', ``myroot'' and ``mbox'' respectively.
