I get mail on one machine, and often use a notebook someplace else,
reading mail over ssh. The spiffy gnome taskbar mailcheck applet on
the notebook doesn't show me the state of my remote inbox. So I wrote
this script, run once a minute out of cron and on mail delivery via
procmail.
Interesting points are
* avoid writing to coda unless the state would change, so there are no
gratuitous invalidation callbacks
* pseudo-mailbox checked by notebook is in a directory by itself, so I
don't invalidate my homedir, which would take longer to fetch
Watching codacon, I see the callback when mail arrives, and a GetAttrs
of Mailbox shortly after. The stat every 10s from the mailcheck
applet normally doesn't cause network traffic.
This is kind of hackish, but it was easier than writing a remote
mailcheck and less scary than turning on imap/pop3 for my workstation.
#!/bin/sh
MAILBOX=$HOME/Mailbox
# don't write main dir - invalidate something small
CODABOX=/coda/home/gdt/Mail/Mailbox
PATH=/usr/local/coda/bin:$PATH
if ctokens | egrep Expiration 2>&1 > /dev/null; then
if [ -s $HOME/Mailbox ]; then
if [ -s $CODABOX ]; then
true;
else
date > $CODABOX
fi
else
if [ -s $CODABOX ]; then
cp /dev/null $CODABOX
else
true;
fi
fi
fi
