File: mspools.el.html

If you use a mail filter (e.g. procmail, filter) to put mail messages in folders, this file will let you see which folders have mail waiting to be read in them. It assumes that new mail for the file folder is written by the filter to a file called folder.spool. (If the file writes directly to folder you may lose mail if new mail arrives whilst you are reading the folder in Emacs, hence the use
of a spool file.) For example, the following procmail recipe puts
any mail with emacs in the subject line into the spool file emacs.spool, ready to go into the folder emacs.
;:0:
;* ^Subject.*emacs
;emacs.spool

It also assumes that all of your spool files and mail folders live in the directory pointed to by mspools-folder-directory, so you must set this (see Installation).

When you run mspools-show, it creates a *spools* buffer containing all of the spools in the folder directory that are waiting to be read. On each line is the spool name and its size in bytes. Move to the line of the folder that you would like to read, and then press return or space. The mailer (VM or RMAIL) should then read that folder and get the new mail for you. When you return to the
*spools* buffer, you will either see "*" to indicate that the spool
has been read, or the remaining unread spools, depending on the value of mspools-update.

This file should work with both VM and RMAIL. See the variable mspools-using-vm for details.

; Basic installation.
(setq mspools-folder-directory "~/MAIL/")

If you use VM, mspools-folder-directory will default to vm-folder-directory unless you have already given it a value.

Extras.

(global-set-key '[S-f1] 'mspools-show) ;Bind mspools-show to Shift F1.
(setq mspools-update t) ;Automatically update buffer.

Interface with the mail filter. We assume that the mail filter drops new mail into the spool folder.spool. If your spool files are something like folder.xyz for inbox folder, then do:
(setq mspools-suffix "xyz")
If you use other conventions for your spool files, this code will need rewriting.

Warning for VM users Don't use if you are not sure what you are doing. The value of vm-spool-files is altered, so you may not be able to read incoming mail with VM if this is incorrectly set.

Useful settings for VM vm-auto-get-new-mail should be t (the default).

Acknowledgments Thanks to jond@mitre.org (Jonathan Doughty) for help with code for setting up vm-spool-files.

; TODO

What if users have mail spools in more than one directory? Extend
mspools-folder-directory to be a list of directories? Currently,
if mail spools are in other directories, the way to read them is to put a symbolic link to the spool into the mspools-folder-directory.

I was going to add mouse support so that you could click on a line to visit the buffer. Tell me if you want it, and I can put the code in (I don't use the mouse much, so I haven't bothered with it so far).

Rather than showing size in bytes, could we see the number of msgs
waiting? (Could be more time demanding / system dependent).
Maybe just call a perl script to do all the hard work, and visualize the results in the buffer.

Shrink wrap the buffer to remove excess white-space?

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