Advanced Polling and Processing mail

The poll.sh script can contain various functionality for, e.g., processing incoming mail. Here are some examples of that.

Checking internet connectivity

You can check for internet connectivity before fetching mail. This may prevent e.g. offlineimap spending a long time figuring out there is no connection. At the top of the poll script:

# check if we have a connection
if ! ping -w 1 -W 1 -c 1 mail.google.com; then
    echo "there is no internet connection"
    exit
fi

Similarly, you can check that other things in the environment are ready for receiving mail, e.g. that the file system containing your mail directory is mounted:

# check if .mail is mounted
if [ ! -d ~/.mail ]; then
    echo ".mail does not seem to be mounted"
    exit
fi

Desktop notification

You can use the notifymuch program to get desktop notifications of new mail. After installing it, you can call it at the end of the poll script:

notifymuch

When new mail arrives, notifymuch will display a notification. More details and configuration options can be found on their GitHub page.

Alternatively, you can use wmctrl to set the "URGENT" flag on the astroid window when new mail arrives:

NEW_MAIL=false
if ! (notmuch new | grep "No new mail."); then
    NEW_MAIL=true
fi

# Tag email etc. here

if [ $NEW_MAIL = true ]; then
    wmctrl -b add,demands_attention -r "Astroid"
fi

If your window manager supports it, this will bring your attention to the astroid window.

Automatic tagging

Automatic tagging of mail can be achieved through notmuch tag --batch. See notmuch-tag(1) for details.

To target only incoming mail, we follow the approach in Approaches to initial tagging of messages. First, add the following to ~/.notmuch-config:

[new]
tags=new;

If this property already exists in your notmuch config, append new; to the list of tags that are added.

Now you can add the following to your poll script, after notmuch new:

notmuch tag --batch <<EOF

    # Tag urgent mail
    +urgent tag:new and subject:URGENT

    # Tag all mail from GitHub as "work"
    +work tag:new and from:github

    # We've finished processing incoming mail
    -new tag:new
EOF

Note: If you don't use tag:new in your queries, you may overwrite tags on old mail that you have set manually.

Random tips related to this:

• You can tag email arriving at different accounts using the to: query.
• You can tag mailing lists using the lists: query.
• You can tag email from certain people with the from: query.
• Threads can be muted using excluded tags.

Scanning for viruses

You can scan attachments for viruses using a tool such as clamav. Alternatively, this can be done just before you open the attachment, as explained in Opening attachments and virus detection.

Note: notmuch hooks

See Introduction to notmuch and notmuch-hooks(5) for an alternative place to put some of the above functionality.