biff4emacsen - A biff-like tool for (X)Emacs

I like to have a little mail indicator icon in the mode line of my XEmacs (or Emacs these days), which informs me about incoming email independently of a running email client.

As a former VM user I have used time.el to reach this objective. Someday I decided to test the Wanderlust email client. But switching over from VM to Wanderlust means also switching from mbox format to maildir format and unfortunately time.el does not work with maildirs. Wanderlust itself has such mail indicator feature. But it only works if Wanderlust is running.

After some unsuccessful searching I decided to start my own project: biff4emacsen. It should have at least the following properties:

  1. show (and update of course) the mail icon independently of a running email client
  2. programmed in lisp only
  3. work with a set of maildirs
  4. should not block (X)Emacs while checking maildirs

First hack

My first hack (yeah, you will find only hacks on this page ;-) fulfils all properties, except the last one. Every time the maildirs are checked, (X)Emacs stops processing keyboard input, screen refreshing, etc. Depending on the number of observed maildirs, harddisk speed, etc. this 'feature' becomes very annoying. Maybe there is a simple solution to this problem. But I am not a true lisp hacker, so I decided to drop the second property and go on with the

Second hack

This approach splits the task into

  1. an application, which checks the state of a set of maildirs periodicaly. A 'client' can send a signal to the application to gather information about arrived email. This application is implemented in C.
  2. a little lisp hack, which starts the application and signals it periodicaly. State changes in the maildirs are reflected by the mail indicator sign in the (X)Emacs mode line.

This hack is still under development. But it is usable and the yet implemented features work flawlessly.

Installation and Usage

Installation is done in less than five minutes. Just download the package, unpack it and follow the README.

Feedback

Feel free to contact me (pkgs@c0t0d0s0.de) and tell me your opinion about biff4emacsen. Do you find biff4emacsen useful? Or is it the most superfluous thing you have seen in ages? Perhaps you have some feature requests?

Downloads

License

All biff4emacsen stuff is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

Impressum