From Linux Man Pages
asmail - the AfterStep e-mail monitor
SYNOPSIS
asmail [-h] [-V] [-v] [-nox]
[-insecure]
[-noconfig]
[-f resource file]
[-geometry X geometry specification]
[-iconic]
[-withdrawn]
DESCRIPTION
The asmail is a X11 application that acts as an e-mail monitor for a
number of various format mailboxes. The asmail provides a distinctive
Afterstep window manager look and feel and features multiple options to
allow the customization.
Basically, the tool shows you the following:
- The background image changes depending on whether
there is e-mail in your mailboxes or not.
Custom images may be loaded and used for animation
sequences.
- The tool will display the number of e-mails waiting
in each mailbox and/or the total numbers for all
mailboxes together.
- For each mailbox, there is a status indicator that
shows whether the update is running at this moment
and indicates if there is an error. The same indicator
shows up next to the summary line.
The folowing indicators are used for the status display:
R An update on the mailbox is running at this moment.
For small mailboxes with fast access, you may never
actually see it - so fast it disappears.
L An error occured that has to do with the login
procedure. Most probably, your name/password
combination was not accepted by the server.
C A connection problem. asmail could not
connect to the server for some reason. The reasons
may be many - server down, network unreachable,
service not available and so on.
T A time-out has occured while asmail was
waiting for the server's answer. If you have a
frequent problem with this but the server seems
to be available in other applicaitons, try
increasing the "timeout" setting for the mailbox.
F This is an indicator of a general error condition.
Something is wrong, maybe the configuration is not
correct, or the mailbox is not readable. Check the
output of asmail by running from the terminal -
this should give you an idea of what is wrong.
The resource files may be specified with a command line option. The
logic of asmail is simple: first it parses the resource file that you
specified on the command line. If you do not specify the resource file
on the command line, asmail will look in the default location
(~/.asmailrc). If it exists, asmail will parse that one. If no config-
uration file was given on the command line and there is no configura-
tion file in the default location, asmail will attempt to monitor the
mailbox specified by the $MAILBOX environment variable.
How asmail distinguishes between old and new mail.
The UNIX mailbox format does not contain any indication on the outside.
The mailbox must be parsed to check if some e-mail is new. Parsing the
mailbox is an expensive operation, especially if the mailbox is large.
asmail checks the mailbox file modification time with the stat(2) sys-
tem call. When the file modification time changes, the mailbox is
parsed. The lines "From " are counted and taken to be the number of e-
mails in the box. After each "From " line, asmail looks for the "Sta-
tus:" header. This header contains flags when the message was seen and
read. Messages without this header line (or with an empty header) are
considered to be new.
The Maildir format is very well-behaved. There are separate folders for
old and new e-mails so we just count the number of files in "cur" and
"new" subdirectories. The "tmp" subdirectory is ignored since this is
the temporary storage and is not supposed to be taken into account.
The mH format is somewhere between Maildir and the UNIX mailbox for-
mats. It is used by mh, nmh, balsa and xfmail among others. The mes-
sages are all stored in separate files, one message per file, and all
of the messages in a single directory. Each message file is named with
an increasing number, so the first message recieved in the mailbox is
stored as "1" and the 39th message is stored as "39". There are two
ways that the status of the messages are kept track of. Traditionally,
the mH tools used a file called ".mh_sequences", which is stored in the
mH directory, to keep track of status. This file contains a series of
sequences, each one starting with a token followed by a colon and then
by a series of message numebrs, representing the messages that belong
to that sequence. It looks something like this:
unseen: 1 2 3-5 19 25-31
Although there are many sequences, some standard and some user-defined,
if the use-mh-sequences configuration option is set to "yes" for that
mailbox, then asmail will parse this file, looking for the "unseen"
sequence to determine how many messages are new. Some mail clients
don't use the .mh_sequences file and instead treat the files in the mH
mailbox just like a collection of seperate messages from a UNIX mail-
box. So, if the use-mh-sequences configuration option is set to "no",
or is not specified at all, then asmail will parse all of the files in
the mH directory, searching for the Status header. Therefore, this mode
is definitely the most "processor hungry" format from the point of view
of asmail. mh, nmh, and newer versions of balsa utilize the
.mh_sequences file, while older versions of balsa and xfmail do not.
It is not known how other clients treat mH mailboxes.
The POP3 protocol does not support the notion of new or old e-mail.
Your e-mail client keeps a list of messages and can tell whether you
read one of them or not. Since asmail does not keep a list of messages
there is no way to tell a new message from the old one. Ok, so what we
do is assume that all e-mail is new at start-up. This is a logical
assumption for most of the people because they store the e-mail locally
and remove it from the server. Others are out of luck. Now, when the
number of messages decreases, we assume that you read all your e-mail
and deleted some, so all messages are marked as old. When the number of
messages increases, we assume that the new mail arrived and we report
the additional mail as new.
The IMAP protocol is very well behaved, it reports the number of new e-
mails and the number of old e-mails if you ask politely :) Since we
open the mailbox in read-only mode, we do not cause any status changes
for the mailbox on the server. The IMAP server will store a special e-
mail into your mailbox if it is in UNIX format. This e-mail allows the
server to keep track of the new and old e-mails. The server will not
report this e-mail into the number of e-mails, so that if you check
your UNIX mailbox directly the number of messages will be one more.
CONFIGURATION OPTIONS
-h
prints a short description and usage message.
-V
Version control. Prints out the version of the program.
-v
Verbose mode. In this mode, asmail will print the information
about mailboxes onto the controlling terminal. The information
includes: number of updates requested, per mailbox: thread PID,
[R]unning or idle, any errors are signalled with leters (see
above) and the number of e-mails in the format new/old. This
mode is useful for debugging or could be used to monitor mail-
boxes without X Windows interface (give the -nox option).
-f resource file
Specifies the alternative location for the resource file. The
default location is ~/.asmailrc If the alternative file is spec-
ified, the default location is ignored.
-geometry X geometry specification
Specifies the size and position of the application on the screen
in the standard X11 format (see XParseGeometry (3x) for
details):
[=][<width>{xX}<height>][{+-}<xoffset>{+-}<yoffset>]
-noconfig
Forces asmail to ignore the resource file even if one is
present. asmail will run with all default settings and check the
Unix mailbox specified by the $MAIL environment variable.
-nox
Starts the asmail application in the terminal-only mode. The X
Windows interface is not started. The configuration file is
still parsed as usual though.
This option implies -v option.
-insecure
Usually, asmail will check that the resource file has the 600
mode, that is there are no access rights for "group" and "oth-
ers". If such access rights are granted, asmail will complain
and exit. This is done to make you remember the passwords you
put into the resource file. If there are no passwords stored in
the file (e.g. you are using UNIX mailbox on the local machine)
the check is not applied.
This option forces asmail to continue operation even if the
resource file has insecure permissions and passwords are stored
in that file.
-iconic
This option will cause asmail to start up as an icon rather than
as a normal window. The application can still be de-iconized and
iconized as usual.
-withdrawn
This option will cause asmail to start up in a so-called "with-
drawn" mode. This mode is used by WindowMaker window manager to
dock the application into their version of the Wharf.
RESOURCE FILE SYNTAX
The syntax of the resource file is described in a separate man page
under asmailrc(5).
INVOCATION
asmail can be called in different ways. The most common invocation is
the command line:
user@host[1]% asmail &
Another way to call asmail is from the window manager:
*Wharf "asmail" nil Swallow "asmail" /usr/local/bin/asmail &
This line, when placed in the wharf file in the users Afterstep config-
uration directory will cause asmail to become a button on the Wharf(1)
button bar under the afterstep(1) window manager.
BUGS
My programs do not have bugs, they just develop random features ;-)
Well, there are limitations. All the strings for the color names, file
names, and other strings have the length limit of 256 characters (ter-
minating zero included). The program will complain about very long
names in the configuration file.
The number of mailboxes is not limited by the space on the icon but the
stats will be chopped (not shown) if you have too many and they do not
fit into the icon. Make sure you pick up a tall icon if you have many
mailboxes and want to see info on each of them because they are shown
from the top down and there is no way to change this.
The information about mailboxes will not appear when you use "shaped"
windows with transparency if it is printed in the transparent area.
asmail may interfere with your mail client program when you use the
POP3 server. There is no way to login to the POP3 server twice (from
the mail client and asmail), so there is an inherent race condition
between the two. The one that tries to log in second, will fail.
asmail logs out immediately after checking so your mail client will
have a much higher chance of precluding asmail from logging in than the
other way around.
If the program is not satisfied with the specification of one of the
mailboxes, it will print an error message, set the status for that
mailbox to F (Failed) and exit the thread (only the thread that is
responsible for handling that particular mailbox). Other mailboxes will
be checked normally. Check the standard output of the tool to see what
the problem is.
FILES
~/.asmailrc
RELATED
asmailrc(5) afterstep(1)
COPYRIGHTS
Copyright (c) 2002-2003 Albert Dorofeev <albert@tigr.net>
Distributed under GNU General Public License v2 ; see LICENSE file for
more informations.
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