kcheckmail 0.2

kcheckmail project is a very simple biff utility written in perl. In its intended usage, it forks into the background, connects to an IMAP server and pops up the From and Subject headers whenever it sees an unread email. All user interaction is done through kdialog.

I could not find any tool or script that does this, so I just wrote it. Hope someone finds it useful.

Installation

kcheckmail.pl requires a few Perl modules, which you can simply apt-get, yum or download from CPAN. These are:

Mail::IMAPClient
AppConfig
Array::Compare
IO::Socket::SSL

It also needs the KDE window environment as it makes use of the kdialog utility.

Once installed, simply extract the kcheckmail-< version >.tar.gz into your home directory. Since you are reading this, I assume you have already done so.

Running

Edit the kcheckmail.pl file and change the $file variable to
the path of the config file. Next, tune the kcheckmail.conf file to reflect your servers settings.

kcheckmail.pl takes command line arguments, but the conf file settings will always override them. kcheckmail.pl --help will show you the command line arguments it takes.

To run in biff mode, do, kcheckmail.pl -mode xbiff

It will then run in the background, and by default will check your INBOX every 60 seconds. If you have not entered your password in the conf file or on the command line, it will use the kdialog utility to prompt you for a password. This is a safer option.

kcheckmail.pl -mode display will simply login to your INBOX and tell you the number of messages and new messages, if any, each time it is run. This does not use kdialog (provided you enter the password in the config file or on the command line), and thus is in now way dependent on KDE, or even X-Windows for that matter. This mode could be useful in
a debugging mode, or simply as a quick check to your inbox.

Other than that, the code is quite well commented, and am sure can easily be modified to suit your needs.