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 Elm1.7.
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, indi-
cating 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:
sendername - subjectofmessage
Priority: sendername - subjectofmessage
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: sendername - subjectofmessage
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 sendername - subjectofmessage
>> Priority mail from sendername - subjectofmessage
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 debug-
ging the program.
-iinterval
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: ifyouchangetheintervaltolessthan10seconds, theprogramwillwarnyouthatitisn'trecommended.
-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.
Filespecs are made up of two components, the foldername
and the prefixstring, 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 mail-
box.
EXAMPLES
Some example invocations:
$ newmail
will check your incoming mailbox every 60 seconds.
$ newmail-i15joeroot
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'', prefix-
ing 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:
$ newmail-i30$LOGNAME=me${LOGNAME}su=myroot/tmp/mbox
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, pre-
fixing new mail for each with ``me'', ``myroot'' and
``mbox'' respectively.
AUTHOR
Elm Development Group
SEE ALSO
notify in sh(1) or csh(1)
BUG REPORTS TO
Bill Pemberton flash@virginia.edu
COPYRIGHTS
Copyright 1988-1995 by The USENET Community Trust
Derived from Elm 2.0, Copyright 1986, 1987 by Dave Taylor