You've got mail!

I recently switched from Gnus to another mail client, mu4e, which I use with offlineimap. I wrote here about the change a few days ago.

Using offlineimap means I now have all my mail in the local filesystem on my laptop again. Very handy in offline scenarios. Naturally, this also meant I needed a new way of telling me if I've got unread mail.

I duckduckgoed around a bit and found nsbiff, a small Objective C program that shows the number of unread mail in a single Maildir on the OS X status bar. nsbiff is a really simple program, the real code is in BIFFAppDelegate.m and the file is all of 102 lines including empty lines. I thought it quite neat and briefly considered adding stuff like extra Maildirs to check and other small changes…

Then, I accidentelly discovered that the program took up 79 megabytes of resident memory! To count files in a directory and show a number in the status bar!? Really?

Instead, I opted for this in Emacs:

(setq display-time-mail-directory "~/Maildir/hack/INBOX/new")

(setq display-time-string-forms
      '((if display-time-day-and-date
           (format "%s %s %s" dayname monthname day) "")
        (format "%s:%s"
                24-hours minutes)
        (if mail (propertize " " 'display display-time-mail-icon))))

(display-time)

which shows me a small mail icon on the Emacs mode-line if there are any files what so ever in the ~/Maildir/hack/INBOX/new directory.

Since I spend almost all of my tube time in front of Emacs anyway, this will have to do.

I also whipped up this small shell script to list the number of unread mail in some important folders. It's very brute force, since it counts all the files on every run, but on small folders it takes almost no time.

#! /bin/sh

prefix=/Users/mc/Maildir

maildirs="/hack/INBOX /hack/mail.mc-plus and a lot of other folders..."

for maildir in $maildirs
do
    count=`ls "$prefix$maildir/new" | wc -l`
    if [ ${count} != "0" ]
    then
        echo $maildir $count
    fi
done