newmail

a mail tool.

newmail is a command line utility to check for new/unread mail in a recursive Maildir++ folder structure. It is written in pure ANSI C, should work on any POSIX compatible system, and can be used for other stuff—like, for example, in combination with Mutt—too.

News

2008-02-02

The darcs repository is gone for a while, but newmail is available via git now. See below!

Getting newmail

Grab the tarball, or do a git clone http://code.burningsoda.com/newmail!

Examples

These are some “usage scenarios” of newmail. For the complete documentation refer to the man page or see below.

• To get a quick overview about which folders contain unread mail, it's sufficient to call newmail without any commandline arguments:

  $ newmail
     2 [ INBOX ]
    11 /lists/bugtraq
     2 /lists/netbsd-current
     4 /lists/pkgsrc-cvs

• Ah, right. But there's a total of... how many mails?

  $ newmail -at
  56170

• And what are the top ten folders, excluding spam & trash, please?

  $ newmail -a | grep -vi 'spam\|trash' | sort -nr | head
   11260 /lists/info
    4287 /lists/bugtraq
    1557 [ INBOX ]
    1062 /lists/pkgsrc-cvs
     955 /bank
     719 /burningsoda/svn
     569 /lists/bsd
     388 /studium
     312 /lists/communities
     306 /lists/info_kbx

• The following three lines in your .muttrc make mutt's browser switch between showing all folders and only folders containing unread mail by pressing keys ‘a’ and ‘n’ respectively:

  mailboxes `newmail`
  macro browser a ":unmailboxes *<enter>:mailboxes \`newmail -am\`<enter><check-new>"\
                  "show all mailboxes"
  macro browser n ":mailboxes *<enter>:mailboxes \`newmail -m\`<enter><check-new>"\
                  "show only mailboxes containing new mail"
    

Documentation

SYNOPSIS

newmail [OPTION]... [DIRECTORY]

DESCRIPTION

For the Maildir++ structure DIRECTORY ($HOME/Maildir by default), newmail lists all folders containing unread mail alphabetically as well as the number of unread mails.

OPTIONS

-a, --all

Count the total number of mails for every folder in DIRECTORY.

-m, --mutt

Output folder names in a mutt friendly way. Using this option the output of newmail can be used by the mailboxes command in mutt (see below).

This options has no effect, if --total is specified.

-n, --no-unseen

Do not treat unseen mails as new. This may be used to speed up newmail, especially on slow file systems. Only use this option if you are sure that no other process watches the structure and moves mails out of the new/ to the cur/ directory of the mail folders. IMAP servers typically do this, once they told clients about those mails.

This options has no effect, if --all is specified.

-t, --total

Sum up the total number of mails (according to the other options, of course) and display nothing but this number.

License

newmail is released under the following license:

©2006–2008 Robert Lillack, burningsoda.com. Last Modified: Tue Feb 19 00:19:22 +0100 2008.