Looking for mailwatch app

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> I'm currently using a very hacked-up old version of gkrellm to
> monitor my mailboxes.  I don't want to maintain it (and there
> are problems with fonts I've never figured out), so I'd like to
> replace it with something else.  I want a separate
> indicator/button and commands for each mailbox.  It looks like
> I can do that with multiple xfce4 mailwatch plugins (one per
> mailbox), but there are a few problems I haven't solved:
> 
>  1) I can't tell which icon is for which mailbox.  I guess I
>     could create a set of my own mail icons that include the
>     mailbox names.

Yep, that's what you'll want to do.

>  2) I keep my panels hidden, which means I can't see the
>     mailwatch icons.  Maybe I can create a separate panel just
>     for the mailwatch plugins and leave that one showing.

Sure, that would work, but would waste screen space.  J-F's idea to use 
notify-send is a good one.  Maybe I could add some placeholders so you 
could do something like "notify-send Mailwatch 'You have %n new messages 
in mailbox %m'".  Someone should file a feature request ^_^.

>  3) In gkrellm, the indicators include the number of new mails.
>     I think I'm going to miss that feature (but I can live
>     without it).

Well, it's shown in the tooltip, at least.

> I'm going to continue playing with the xfce4 mailwatch plugin,
> but was wondering if there was another GTK or XFCE app that
> people suggest for watching mailboxes (it needs to support IMAP
> w/SSL, Maildir, and mbox formats).

Not that I know of.  Pasi and I wrote Mailwatch because we couldn't find 
another app that met those exact requirements.  If you use claws-mail, I 
believe there's a systray notification plugin, but of course that only 
works if you use claws-mail, and keep it running all the time.  There 
might be something similar for Thunderbird, but I don't know.  Other 
MUAs might have similar features.

>  * I had to change the timeout period on some of the instances
>    3 or 4 times before it would "stick".  I'd change it from 10
>    minutes to 1 minute, close all of the dialog boxes, and then
>    when I opened the property dialog again, it had changed back
>    to 10 minutes.

That's fixed in SVN.  I should be doing a new release Real Soon Now 
(it's been over 2 years since the last release, I think).  I was 
furiously hacking on Mailwatch a few weeks ago, and it's feeling pretty 
stable for me now.

>  * I still can't figure out how to tell mailwatch that "INBOX"
>    isn't the name of my inbox.  The checkbox next to INBOX is
>    stuck in the "checked" state.

That's apparently a naive assumption on my part.  Please file a bug on 
bugzilla.xfce.org.

>  * I was unable to configure one of my inboxes (named
>    "Mail/inbox") on one server.  The little box next to it was
>    checked by default, but when I traced the IMAP connection,
>    Mail/inbox wasn't being queried.  I finally resorted to
>    editing the mailwatch*.rc file by hand to add Mail/inbox.
>    Now it's checking Mail/inbox -- it's still also checking
>    INBOX (which isn't an inbox), but that's harmless.

I imagine that's related to the above...

I'd be perfectly happy just editing the .rc files, but I can't
figure out how to get the applet to re-read them without
shutting down xfce and restarting it.

$ xfce4-panel -x
$ vim /path/to/rcfile
$ (cd ~ && xfce4-panel & disown)

(But yeah, you shouldn't need to do this... any instance in which you do 
is a bug.)

> Has anybody considered just keeping the IMAP connection up
> instead shutting down and starting up a connection for each
> poll? Holding an IMAP connection open uses a _lot_ less
> resources (on both ends) than does constantly re-doing SSL
> handshaking and SSL and IMAP authentication protocols.

No, I haven't considered it.  I imagine, though, that this isn't true 
for unencrypted SSL connections (yeah, I figure there are more people 
using those than I'd like).  The architecture (in the current released 
version) is sorta vaguely suited to keeping the connection open, though 
not with some annoying changes.  The architecture in SVN now would 
require major changes to keep a connection open, as now not even the 
checker thread is kept alive in between mail checks.  I'm not convinced 
this is worth the time and effort to change.

Though I think your concern is partly an artifact of your rather short 
interval.  A 10-minute interval without maintaining the connection is 
proably less work than maintaining a connection with a 10-minute 
interval.  The same may not be true for a 1-minute interval.

	-b