Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hplabsz!mayer
From: mayer@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Niels Mayer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: can I identify folders with new mail
Message-ID: <2488@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Oct 88 02:06:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: hplabsz.2488
References: <348@taeva.UUCP>
Reply-To: mayer@hplabs.hp.com (Niels Mayer)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Labs, Software Technology Lab, Palo Alto, CA.
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In article <348@taeva.UUCP> hans@taeva.UUCP (Hans von Kleist-Retzow) writes:
>
>We are building a mailfilter which allows to distribute the
>incoming mail into different folder. Now I have the problem
>that I want to get informed in which folder new mail has arrived.
>So I need an extension to folders (e.g. an option 'new') which
>shows only the folders which contain mails which I haven't seen up
>to now. To get this date I must expand scan and show so that it marks a mail
>if it is read. etc. There has to be done a little bit more.

I'm assuming you'vo got "| /usr/local/lib/mh/slocal" in your ~/.forward file
and are using 'rcvstore' program to incorporate messages into the chosen
folders as specified by the file ~/.maildelivery used by 'slocal'.

I'm also assuming that you've set "Unseen-Sequence:	unseen" in your
~/.mh_profile.

Given the above, new messages that are automatically incorporated by
'rcvstore' get added to the unseen sequence of the paricular folder.
(Viewing a message with 'show' will remove it from the unseen sequence).
You can then use various techniques to figure out the existance of the
unseen sequence in the folders: 1) look for "unseen: <msg>... " in
<folder>/.mh_sequences; or 2) use mhpath. 

For example, I just whipped up the following using csh interactively:

hplnpm[21] ~> foreach i (`folders -recurse -fast`)
? mhpath +$i unseen >& /dev/null
? if ($status == 0) echo Unseen messages in folder $i
? end

The results I got were:

Unseen messages in folder inbox
Unseen messages in folder music/research
Unseen messages in folder nm-list
Unseen messages in folder subgenius

Happy hacking,
   Niels Mayer.