The Foursquare Blog

My list of mailing lists is getting so large that I now have a class of mboxes that are more archive and reference than something I'm actively interested in.

Here's an update for those following my newmail.cc mailbox reporter program.

I added the capability of listing archive mboxes in your .newmailrc with a value of -2. Then you can selectively hide/show this second-tier list of mboxes with the -H and -S switches.

I also added an environmental getopt() that behaves the same way as getopt(), but prepends the command line options from an environment variable ahead of the argv[] options.

env_getopt() seemed like something that somebody would have implemented before, but I didn't see anything like it in my web search. I may have reinvented the wheel. Anyway, it is now implemented as GPLv2 in case others need the same functionality.

[Edited to fix link]

dwmw2 mentioned that he can't live without a tree view of mail folders showing which have new messages.

I currently use a combination of procmail, mutt, and my own scripts to sort and read mail. The procmail script sorts the mail into organized mbox files in ~/Mail/. Then I run newmail to get a list of mailboxes with new messages in them. Then I use

mutt -f Mail/mboxfile

to read.

Here's an example of my "newmail" output:

 Total     New  Mbox                                                          
------  ------  ----------------------------------------------                
    55       1  barry
   158      21 *bochs-dev (1)
  2096    1405  boost
   446     444 *bugtraq (3)
    80      78  bugtraq-generic
   402     144  c++
  4072       3  canada-dmca-opponents
  1200     157 *cdfrey (1)
   166     120  debian
   246      67  gentoo-announce
    41      15 *gentoo-desktop (1)
  1848    1022  gentoo-dev
    38       6  gentoo-gwn
    82      28  gentoo-hardened
   355     237 *gentoo-portage-dev (1)
   605      62  gentoo-security
   276     247 *gentoo-server (4)
  1217    1217  git
    11      10  gnupg-announce
    91      90  gnupg-devel
   423     331  gnupg-users
   129      82  kt
  1162       8  kwlug
   364     133  libusb
 10023   10022  linux-kernel
   601     344  linux-thinkpad
   144     144 *mailer-daemon (5)
   551     314  mplayer-users
   411     401  open-graphics
  1404     164  plusplus
   541      35  plusplus-commits
    63      34  risks
   211     189  slashdot
    47       2  spca50x-devs
     8       1  xboard

Yes, I'm a little behind. :-) This shows the total messages in the mbox file, the total unread messages, which mboxes have had new mail since I last checked (*), and how many new messages arrived since I last checked.

It's worked pretty well, not only as a mail system but as a spam whitelist too. I only use the code personally, so the code isn't polished for release. It's a single .cc file that can be compiled standalone, so it shouldn't be too hard to play with if you want.

Update: Found a bug where two uninitialized variables cause a new mail count to be out of whack the first time you run it. Once the mailbox data is cached, behaviour is normal.

Grab the file again if this matters to you.