Now here's a weird thing. I'm using mutt 1.5.18 right now (on ubuntu 8.10) to read my gmail account over imap, I don't have the sidebar patch installed, and I'm finding that if I press 'y' I get taken to a list of all my imap folders (these have not been listed by me in the muttrc, mutt is finding them itself on the imap server) and beside each folder it's telling me how many unread mails are in the folder. What the? Since when was mutt able to do this?
Here's a screenshot: http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/2584/muttrk6.png (Take a look at that mail volume by the way, and you'll see why some of the earlier suggestions such as pressing '.' or 'c' then return would not work for me). I've attached my muttrc file, not sure which part of it (if any) is enabling this feature, but there you go. It does exactly what I was looking for when I was trying to use the sidebar patch and asking what other people do, I just didn't know mutt could do this. Regarding the biff programs that someone mentioned ... I went looking for linux mail notification programs. There are many out there, most of which look rubbish, there's a few funny ones too, such as opening a cd tray when new mail arrives, or flashing keyboard LEDs when new mail arrives. In short, I settled on gnubiff for my non-gmail accounts that do not have lots of folders, I didn't find any that could handle my gmail account, with the large number of folders. To be useful it would have to at least present me a list of all the folders and how many unread mails in each, without me having to tell it about every folder one by one, and nothing can do that. But mutt is now doing that for me so it doesn't matter. There are a large number of gmail-specific mail notifiers out there for linux that I did not look at though (I was looking for imap ones). For my non-gmail accounts which do not have a large number of different folders or a high-volume of email, I found that gnubiff works best, it does the job nicely, although it's not perfect. It's nice to have a program that runs in the background and just tells me if I have mail, so I don't have to keep opening my mail client to check. Gnubiff and mail-notification seem to be the two main choices. Here's a comparison in case anyone's interested: Both of these programs use what seems a bizarrely huge amount of memory for what they do -- almost 10mb, when they're just sitting there waiting to check email. gnubiff http://gnubiff.sourceforge.net/ - Works as a gnome panel applet, in a system tray (gnome or compatible) or as a GTK standalone window. - Keeps its configuration in a single ~/.gnubiffrc file. - Has a cute icon and new-mail sound. - The configuration dialog does not feel very nice, it's one of those gnome/gtk apps that doesn't quite feel like a gnome app. But worse, it doesn't work. Not exactly reassuring. On my first several tries it just kept ignoring me when I added my imap account. Eventually I did get it to work, by a combination of manually editing the config file and using the GUI. - Once configured it does actually work, for both my home and mail accounts, including autodetecting and using ssl. So it does the jon just fine. - It can tell you how many unread mails are in each configured account, and show you the subject line, from header, etc. for each mail. Mail Notification http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/ - It works as a system tray icon only, so should work outside of gnome as long as you have a gnome-compatible system tray. - The configuration dialog is a lot nicer than gnubiff, feels right and actually works. - The popup messages it shows when new mails arrive are much nicer than gnubiffs (it's using the newer gnome notifications system). - Unfortunately mail-notification itself does not work for either of my imap accounts, it worked for the first test only, after that it never shows me any notification of new mails, and for my work account that requires ssl it simply says it cannot login. - In gnubiff if you want to force it to check for new mail right now you just click on the gnubiff icon. Since mail-notification shows no icon when there's no new mail you can't do this, so if you want to force it to check for mail, you have to run mail-notification -u in a terminal (which doesn't work, in line with mail-checking in general not working). There's a long list of more linux mail-notification programs here, but nothing that looks more promising than the above two: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Internet/Mail/Notification/index.shtml This Python script for checking email through the system monitor tool conky looks promising: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869771 For now I think I'm content with gnubiff and its cutesiness.