xmailheaders

xmailheaders is a mail notification utility based on the mailbox utility that's available on Solaris workstations. The idea is that it sits on your desktop somewhere, periodically polling the mail server/spool for new messages. New message headers are displayed as they come in.

Supported mailbox formats are POP3, IMAPv4, and Unix mail. SSL-based password authentication is also supported for POP and IMAP. If you choose to use SSL, you should note that xmailheaders makes no attempt to verify the authenticity of SSL certificates, so you're on your own if some evil hacker named Mallory intercepts your SSL session and replaces the server certificates with his own.

xmailheaders is written in C++ and uses the X Athena Widget toolkit. Source code is available under the GPL.

small screenshot 1
A simple, no frills screenshot.

Usage:

800x600 screenshot
Screenshot of xmailheaders (bottom center) on my desktop, running fvwm as the window manager. I've configured fvwm so that xmailheaders runs without any window decorations. Command line I use is:
xmailheaders -geometry 400x100+100-0 -bg gray10 -fg green --type imap -s imap.server.com -u albert -f ${HOME}/.xmailheaders --ssl

Invoking xmailheaders -h will give you the following help text. 

xmailheaders --type type [options]
        
   --type type      imap, pop, or local (default)
   --interval n     update interval, in seconds )
   -h help          displays this help text
        
 POP / IMAP options:
   -s server        mail server to connect to.
   -p port          port to connect to.  optional.
   -u login         user name to authenticate as.
   -f passfile      plaintext file containing password to use for auth.
   --ssl            use SSL encryption

   min update interval is 30 seconds (default)

 IMAP only options:
   --imapfolder f  imap folder to check messages on. Default INBOX

 local mail only options:
   --spool file     local only.  Path to mbox format mail file
    
   min update interval is 10 seconds (default)

 The following standard X Toolkit options are supported:
   -fg fgcolor     foreground text color
   -bg bgcolor     background window color
   -geometry geom  window geometry

Requirements:

Your system must have SSL support, as well as the X Athena Widget Toolkit installed. I wrote it to work on Linux, but it should port very easily to any other Unix.

Download:

Source .tar.gz
Current version: 0.1.1 (May 25, 2004)

Links:

Version History:

0.1.1 May 25, 2004
Bug fixes. IMAP commands fixed by Martin Ward. Fixed premature abort. Still works for me
0.1 December 26, 2003
realized that there's already something out there named xmailbox, and renamed everything to xmailheaders. stupid me.
0.1 December 21, 2003
Works for me

Please direct comments and suggestions to ashuang[at]users[dot]sourceforge[dot]net

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