XBuffy 07/22/94 Xbuffy was written by Bill Pemberton (wfp5p@virginia.edu) and was based on Xmultibiff by John Reardon. Xmultibiff can be found at ftp.midnight.com. I was looking for a replacement for XBiff. I use the filter program (it comes with elm) to separate my mail into several different mailboxes. I looked at a lot of replacements for XBiff until I found Xmultibiff. Xmultibiff was very promising, but it didn't do quite what I wanted it to do, so I modified it to create XBuffy. Basically, XBuffy (and Xmultibiff) is a XBiff-type program with a lot of new options. With XBuffy you can watch multiple mailboxes. When new mail arrives, you can have a pop up window showing the From: and Subject: lines. You can also set it up to launch your favorite mail reader when you click on a box. Currently. xbuffy is only capable of watching mailboxes with the standard mailbox format (messages separated with a From line). This version also incorporates a new feature which will let you monitor newsgroups in the same way you monitor mailboxes. It parses your .newsrc and uses NNTP to monitor any given group or groups. It will keep constant track of how many unread articles are in a specified newsgroup(s). Also, when new articles come in, it will pop up the From and Subject lines of the article just like it pops them up for mailboxes. Note that this feature won't be able to see new incoming articles if you are using a version of NNTP prior to 1.5.11t5 (the problem is with the NNTP server, not Xbuffy). Xbuffy uses the Athena Widget library and the libDyn package (libDyn is included here). To build: % xmkmf -a % make If the make fails there are a few changes you may have to change for some platforms. Look at the file config.h and change anything that is appropriate. To learn of the usefulness of multiple mailboxes and incoming mail processing, check out procmail written by S.R. van den Berg. It can be used to sort your incoming mail into separate files, start programs when mail arrives, and a host of other things. A recent version can be gotten from ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (137.226.112.172) in pub/unix/procmail.tar.Z. Some mailers (including elm) cause a problem with xbuffy. When you read a mail message, a Status: header is added to the message to show that the message has been read. Many mailers will only add this header to message in your real mailbox. This means that xbuffy can not tell if you've read mail in other folders. Some mailers have configuration options that force it to add Status: headers, some (like elm) don't. I've made a patch to elm to create a mode that DOES add Status: headers. This is known as Magic mode. Contact me if you want more information about the changes to elm. Xbuffy has been tested on SunOS 4.1.3 AIX 3.2.X Irix 4.X Please e-mail all added features (and any problems you may have) to wfp5p@virginia.EDU.
