mh-e: Incorporating Mail
5 Incorporating Your Mail
*************************
This chapter talks about getting mail from your system mailbox into your
MH ‘+inbox’ folder. The following command accomplishes that and is
found in the ‘Folder’ menu.
‘i’
Incorporate new mail into a folder (‘mh-inc-folder’).
The following options in the ‘mh-inc’ customization group are used.
‘mh-inc-prog’
Program to incorporate mail (default: ‘"inc"’).
‘mh-inc-spool-list’
Alternate spool files (default: ‘nil’).
The following hook is available.
‘mh-inc-folder-hook’
Hook run by ‘mh-inc-folder’ after incorporating mail into a folder
(default: ‘nil’).
If at any time you receive new mail, incorporate the new mail into
your ‘+inbox’ buffer with ‘i’ (‘mh-inc-folder’). Note that ‘i’ will
display the ‘+inbox’ buffer, even if there isn’t any new mail. You can
incorporate mail from any file into the current folder by specifying a
prefix argument; you’ll be prompted for the name of the file to use as
well as the destination folder (for example, ‘C-u i ~/mbox <RET> +tmp
<RET>’).
Emacs can notify you when you have new mail by displaying ‘Mail’ in
the mode line. To enable this behavior, and to have a clock in the mode
line as well, add the following to ‘~/.emacs’:
(display-time)
The name of the program that incorporates new mail is stored in
‘mh-inc-prog’; it is ‘"inc"’ by default. This program generates a
one-line summary for each of the new messages. Unless it is an absolute
pathname, the file is assumed to be in the ‘mh-progs’ directory (
Getting Started). You may also link a file to ‘inc’ that uses a
different format (see ‘mh-profile’(5), and sections Reading Mail: inc
show next prev (http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/reapre.html) and
MH Format Strings (http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/mhstr.html) in
the MH book). You’ll then need to modify several variables
appropriately (Scan Line Formats).
You can use the ‘mh-inc-spool-list’ variable to direct MH-E to
retrieve mail from arbitrary spool files other than your system mailbox,
file it in folders other than your ‘+inbox’, and assign key bindings to
incorporate this mail.
Suppose you are subscribed to the mh-e-devel mailing list and you use
‘procmail’ to filter this mail into ‘~/mail/mh-e’ with the following
recipe in ‘.procmailrc’:
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh
MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path`
:0:
* ^From mh-e-devel-admin@stop.mail-abuse.org
mh-e
In order to incorporate ‘~/mail/mh-e’ into ‘+mh-e’ with an ‘I m’
(‘mh-inc-spool-mh-e’) command, customize this option, and click on the
‘INS’ button. Enter a ‘Spool File’ of ‘~/mail/mh-e’, a ‘Folder’ of
‘mh-e’, and a ‘Key Binding’ of ‘m’.
You can use ‘xbuffy’ to automate the incorporation of this mail using
the Emacs 23 command ‘emacsclient’ as follows:
box ~/mail/mh-e
title mh-e
origMode
polltime 10
headertime 0
command emacsclient --eval '(mh-inc-spool-mh-e)'
In XEmacs, the command ‘gnuclient’ is used in a similar fashion.
You can set the hook ‘mh-inc-folder-hook’, which is called after new
mail is incorporated by the ‘i’ (‘mh-inc-folder’) command. A good use
of this hook is to rescan the whole folder either after running ‘M-x
mh-rmail’ the first time or when you’ve changed the message numbers from
outside of MH-E.
(defun my-mh-inc-folder-hook ()
"Hook to rescan folder after incorporating mail."
(if (buffer-modified-p) ; if outstanding refiles and deletes,
(mh-execute-commands)) ; carry them out
(mh-rescan-folder) ; synchronize with +inbox
(mh-show)) ; show the current message
(add-hook 'mh-inc-folder-hook 'my-mh-inc-folder-hook)
Rescan folder after incorporating new mail via mh-inc-folder-hook
Info Catalog
mh-e: Using This Manual
mh-e: Top
mh-e: Reading Mail