Re: A Gnus Biff

[Ben Kibbey <bjk@luxsci.net>]

William Gardella <gardellawg@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey,
>
> I'm in the process of writing a simple "biff" for Gnus, to notify me if
> one or more of a list of designated Gnus groups has unread messages in
> it (see below).  So far it crudely works, and is suitable for use
> interactively or by `display-time-mail-function' if you want "Mail" to
> appear in the mode line for Gnus messages instead of mails in your local
> mailspool.  What it doesn't have as yet, as you'll see, is very good
> error handling.

It may be off-topic to the subject, but I wish someone would redo
maildir support in Emacs to handle message flags. I have maildir
mailboxes and use conky to show mailbox status (new messages) then call
gnus-group-get-new-news to refresh the mailbox display after the
messages have been retrieved from fetchmail. The problem is that each
message status is overwritten by gnus (no longer new to conky) and I am
no longer notified of new messages on any workspace (sawfish) until I
visit the gnus frame in another workspace.

I could prevent refreshing the gnus mail status by preventing the
gnus-group-get-new-news call (emacsclient) and keep the conky message
status as new, but then I would still have to refresh the gnus frame to
see the new messages.

Others have had this dillema and I wish I could submit a patch to fix it
but I don't have the elisp expertise. Or maybe I'm missing something?
Maybe there is a better gnus/maildir/conky setup someone else has?

-- 
Ben Kibbey