Joe Szilagyi wrote: > Normally something in /var/spool/mail doesn't pick up the lines: > > Status: O > Status: RO > > Or the link until a mail client actually accesses it, such as Pine (simply > launching it), or Evo, Outlook, etc. > > Is there any way in bash to force the file to upload, and pick up these > tags, and be listed as R or RO? I'm wanting to write a quick script to read > mailboxes and accurately output the number of "new" emails in a box without > actually going into it. Well, you haven't actually given us much to go on, here. There are a number of ways of configuring e-mail. The mention of Outlook makes me assume that you're running POP3 and/or IMAP servers: which one (Dovecot? Cyrus?) Is *all* your e-mail access through that service, or do you read any locally? What, exactly, do you mean by "upload"? The Status: header is traditional Unix mailbox format (see http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/2004.01/msg00061.html for more details). In my case, for instance, I use procmail to deliver to maildir folders, in which case, counting the "new" items is simply a matter of doing a wc -l on the "New" directory inside the maildir. Other flags are stored in the filename, where you can use globs. If what you're really after is a way to count e-mails in a file without the Status: line, and if you're sure your MTA quotes lines that start "From ", then you could use grep -c to count lines beginning "From " and subtract the number of "Status: " lines. Or you could add a blank "Status: " through procmail. Um. You said "accurately". This means reading the mailbox: you can't guarantee that some inconsiderate individual on a mailing list won't put Status: at the beginning of a line... You need to know when a header starts, and when it stops. The procmail package already has a program to do this: formail. formail -x From\ -s < mailbox will list each "From " header in the mailbox. formail -x Status -s < mailbox will list each Status line in the mailbox. Use wc -l on each to count, and expr to do the maths. Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james | "I blame the teachers, and I blame the politicians @westexe.demon.co.uk | for picking the teachers, and I blame the parents | for voting them in, and top of the list I put the | bastard who invented the caps-lock key." | -- Chris Hacking
