Polling

Astroid is only a "Mail User Agent" and so it won't fetch or sync your email for you. Astroid will "poll" your mail, i.e. it will call other programs that take care of fetching, syncing or indexing your new mail (for example, see our introduction to notmuch and see offlineimap).

You can poll your mail by pressing P (by default, bound to main_window.poll) which will execute the script found at ~/.config/astroid/poll.sh. An example script can be found in the examples directory; if all you need is offlineimap and notmuch new you can copy this example script to the right location and make it executable. Examples of more advanced functionality can be found in Processing mail.

Automatic polling is controlled by poll.interval, and is specified in seconds (typically 160). To disable set poll.interval to some value <= 0.