URL: http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/gbuffy/ Author: Brandon Long Email: blong@fiction.net Current Version: 0.2.4 Date: 08-25-2001 GBuffy GBuffy is a GTK+ multiple mailbox "biff" program. It is conceptually based on XBuffy by Bill Pemberton, but is a complete rewrite from scratch. GBuffy will poll multiple mailboxes for new mail. It will list the number of new messages in each mailbox you configure. It will also highlight the mailboxes which have new mail. Pressing the left mouse button on a mailbox with new mail will display the Sender and Subject of each new message. Additionally, GBuffy will display the X-Face header for messages which have them. Pressing the middle mouse button on a mailbox will launch the configured command, generally a command to read the mailbox with your favorite mailreader. Pressing the right mouse button will bring up the configure menu. GBuffy is currently capable of watching MBOX, MMDF, Maildir and MH Folders. This version also supports IMAP4rev1 and NNTP with XOVER. Support for an external program for notification is planned. The main advantages of GBuffy over XBuffy are: * Uses the GTK+ Toolkit * Supports the X-Face: header * Easy User Configuration * Configuration data stored using GNUStep libPropList * RFC2047 decoding of headers (that's non US-ASCII character set support) * Support for Maildir and MH mailboxes * Support for IMAP mailboxes Status Current Version: 0.2.3 Currently, GBuffy is ALPHA code. It is fairly stable, but may contain memory leaks, may suddenly die if you do something I haven't. Not all features are yet implemented, and it may not be the easiest to compile yet. In the future, it may become a GNOME application, which should be pretty simple given that it already uses GTK+ and libPropList. ToDo: * Support images for each mailbox instead of text Download Only available as Source. Requires: * GTK+ 1.1.11 or later * libPropList 7.3 or later (available at http://www.windowmaker.org/) or http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/gbuffy/libPropList-0.9.1.tar.gz I recommend using version 0.9.1, its less likely to core dump * libcompface for decoding X-Face headers. Included. Installation To compile, run ./configure in this directory. It should work, mostly. You may need to modify the resulting makefile to find gtk-config and/or the libPropList library, as these are autodetected yet. The binary, gbuffy, should be able to be installed anywhere. Just run gbuffy to start the application. The first time, you will get a message about having no defaults. Click the right mouse button in the resulting window, and configure your mailboxes and save. Note that GBuffy will save your defaults in ~/GNUStep/Defaults if it exists, or in ~/.gbuffyrc otherwise. You shouldn't hand edit this file. There is a simple perl script included in this distribution which you can use to convert a XBuffy boxfile to a GBuffy configuration file. For instance, you could do: ./convert.pl < ~/.xbuffy > ~/GNUStep/Defaults/GBuffy Then again, this may not work As of GTK+ 1.1.6, GTK+ will parse /etc/gtkrc and ~/.gtkrc. The GBuffy distribution comes with an example gtkrc, gtkrc.example, which was used to create the screenshots on the GBuffy homepage. NOTE: Currently, GBuffy requires IMAP4rev1 compatible IMAP servers, and for NNTP, it requires the server support XOVER. Using GBuffy with MH folders It seems that different mh folder implementations do different things to maintain status information about which messages are unseen/read/etc. Early versions of gbuffy only supported mutt 1.2.x and early mh folders, in that it would parse every file looking for the Status: header line (similar to mbox folders). I gather that this is actually fairly uncommon. As of gbuffy 0.2.6, we support the .sylpheed_mark file used by sylpheed, and the .mh_sequences supported by nmh, exmh and mutt 1.3+ (and probably others). Note that the .sylpheed_mark file overrides the .mh_sequences file, so if you aren't using sylpheed, you'll want to make sure that file doesn't exist. The old "parse every file" is no longer supported, since there is no way to detect when its necessary to do that (maybe as a fallback from the above two... the problem is, if there is no status header we treat that as new, which means that all the messages in the mh folder are always new if it isn't a older version of mutt). If you upgraded mutt from -1.2 to 1.3+, you might want to regenerate the .mh_sequences file, there is a script to do that here: http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/kuperman/software/ Note that it appears that the command-line mh programs, the settings of the .mh_sequences file are actually controlled in ~/.mh_profile by the Unseen-Sequence command. The patch from Diego supported looking that up... maybe I'll fix that later (someone else is welcome to). http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/kuperman/software/patches/use_mhunseen-0.2.2.patch As for the sylpheed_mark stuff, check out this thread, I may be doing it wrong... http://www.tmtm.org/cgi-bin/w3ml/sylpheed/msg/19432