Re: New mail notification not working

[Russell Hoover <rj@panix.com>]

On Fri 09/07/01 at 05:11 PM +0000, Bart Schaefer
<schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:

> No, you don't need anything after the name of the directory; you
> don't even need the trailing slash, though it should be harmless.

Thanks  --  I asked that because the last sentence for the ``mailpath''
entry in the manual is this:

             ``If  an element is a directory instead
               of a file the shell will recursively
               check every file in every subdirectory
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
               of the element."


Which might well lead one to believe that, in the case of maildirs, unless
I specified the ``new'' subdir, zsh would check the ``tmp'' and ``cur''
subdirs as well, and checking ``cur'' could be a disaster as ``cur'' might
contain dozens or hundreds of (non-new) messages.

> Anyway, mailstat() is using a single static structure to keep track of
> the last-modified time of the maildir "new" subdir. This means that it
> only works correctly if you have exactly one maildir directory in your
> mailpath -- if you have multiple maildirs, it gets confused about which
> modified-time to compare; it checks each maildir for new-ness against
> the modified time of the one preceding it in the mailpath, cycling to
> check the first maildir against the last on subsequent calls.

To understand this fully I seem to need to make a distinction: you say
"exactly one maildir directory in your mailpath"  --  Does that mean that
I must have only one *defined* in my mailpath, or only one in existence?

(I'd be quite satisfied, for now at least, to have notification working
just for my inbox.)

I have a total of two directories for all my mail:  (a)  my inbox, which
is ~/.mailspool/rj/ (with the three maildir subdirs -- ``cur'', ``new'',
and ``tmp'' -- inside of that) and  (b)  a ``Mail'' directory, containing
about a dozen subdirs of various mailing-list nicknames, etc.  (and each
of them, of course, has *its* own set of the three maildir subdirs).

Shouldn't notification be working if I just have either of these defined
in my .zshrc:

            export MAIL=$HOME/.mailspool/rj

or:         mailpath=($HOME/.mailspool/rj'?New mail has arrived.')

(btw, should the opening quote-mark above be where it is, or should it
be just before ``$HOME'', or does it matter?)

OR, does the mere fact that I have several maildirs *simply existing*
in the ``Mail'' directory (which is not defined in either ``MAIL'' or
``mailpath'' in my zsh init files)  --  does that *in and of itself*
confound mailstat?

(If it's the latter, it would seem that I'm out of luck until mailstat()
can be re-made along the lines of your suggestion.)

> So you ought to be getting notified some of the time, but it would seem
> random when you don't know what's going on.

I am only getting the (default) notification under one circumstance only,
and that is the following:

(a)  From within either mutt's index or pager, I press `e' in mutt
     to edit the raw message;

(b)  I am put into vim and I edit the message;

(c)  I write-quit out of vim and the new message appears in
     mutt's index, while the previous version of that message
     is marked for deletion;

(d)  I quickly switch to another terminal window and see
     ``You have new mail.'' appear before the zsh prompt
     after I press the RETURN key.


Thank you for your indulgence (trying not to seem too
obtuse about it all).

-- 
                                 // rj@panix.com //