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CHK4MAIL(1)		  BSD General Commands Manual		   CHK4MAIL(1)

NAME
     chk4mail — list the number of mails in your mailfolders

SYNOPSIS
     chk4mail [--acfhijlnqstux] [-d directory] [-e folder] [-m padding]
	      [-r host] [-# padding] folder ...

DESCRIPTION
     This manual page documents the chk4mail utility.

     This program lists the number of read and unread emails in the folders in
     your maildirectory and your incoming mailfolder. The program assumes that
     the mailfolders reside in the subdir ~/Mail (or alternatively ~/mail).
     To determine the incoming folder, the value of the environment variable
     ${MAIL} is used.

     However if you explicitly mention the mailfolders you want to see on the
     commandline, then only those files will be checked for new mail. You can
     specify the names as absolute filenames or use the =folder notation to
     indicate that the folder is located in your maildirectory.	 Instead of
     the equals sign (‘=’), a plus (‘+’) may be used as well.

     The mailfolders are shown (and parsed) in alphabetical order, excluding
     any empty folders. The incoming folder is always shown last. Folder names
     that don't start with a lower case character will be ignored. When the
     number of emails cannot be determined (e.g. due to missing headers), a
     question mark is shown instead.

     Although the mailfolders need to be read to obtain the necessary informa‐
     tion, the original file access time will be preserved. Other programs
     such as mutt(1) and tcsh(1) use the access time to determine when new
     mail has arrived. Let's not upset these programs...

OPTIONS
     -a	     Display the number of messages which have been answered.  Only
	     works if your mailreader supports this X-Status extension.
     -c	     Also display folders when the name starts with a capital (the
	     default is to ignore these folders).
     -d directory
	     Look for mailfolders in the specified directory instead of the
	     default.
     -e folder
	     Exclude the specified mail folder.	 Note that the -e options may
	     be given multiple times to exclude more mailfolders.  Extra
	     folder names explicitly specified as command line arguments will
	     override any exclude options.
     -f	     Display the number of messages which have flagged as important.
	     Only works if your mailreader supports this X-Status extension.
     -g	     Display the number of messages that are cryptographically signed.
	     Does not work for Maildir folders, or mails that do not list this
	     information in the headers.
     -G	     Display the number of messages that are encrypted.	 Does not work
	     for Maildir folders, or mails that do not list this information
	     in the headers.
     -h	     Hide folders which contain only old mail (any folder with mail
	     marked as new will be displayed).
     -i	     Only parse the standard incoming mail folder.
     -j	     Parse everything except the standard incoming mail folder.
     -l	     Always follow symbolic links. By default symbolic links are only
	     followed when the filename is mentioned in $MAIL or as a command
	     line argument, but not when encountered in your mailfolder direc‐
	     tory.
     -m number
	     Set the maximum folder name length. This is usually detected
	     automatically, but not when you use Maildirs with subfolders.
	     Setting this may lead to a prettier layout formatting.
     -n	     Only show new folders, i.e. folders that actually received new
	     mail since the last time you opened them.	If you have quite some
	     mailfolders (with old mail), this will be much faster than using
	     the -h option.
     -p	     Use pthreads for parallel processing of multiple folders at once.
	     This may speed up the process, but can actually be slower in some
	     environments. This feature is still experimental: it produces
	     incorrect results on some architectures.
     -q	     Suppress errors when a specified file is missing or can not be
	     read.  With this option, unreable files will be simply ignored.
     -r hostname
	     Execute this program on another machine, using rsh(1) to the
	     remote host.  If this option is specified, then all other com‐
	     mand-line options will be ignored.
	     If hostname equals the local hostname (without a domain), then
	     this option will be ignored completely.
     -s	     Short output: only show files which haven't been opened since the
	     last time that new mail had been received (this is fast). Implies
	     the -n option.
     -t	     Change the timestamp of "old" mailfolders which do however con‐
	     tain new messages. This will make sure that other mail programs
	     will also detect the new messages and that they will show up with
	     -n in future runs as well. This option does not affect the time‐
	     stamp of folders that were already detected as "new" (i.e. fold‐
	     ers that do show up with -n already).
	     Note that this option as absolutely no effect in combination with
	     the -n flag: because that will skip the examination of these
	     "old" folders.
     -u	     Treat unread messages as old instead of new email.
     -w	     Perform case sensitive parsing of mail headers. Although most
	     applications generate headers in standard case-specific format,
	     this is not a strict requirement. In general, mail message head‐
	     ers are case insensitive.	Therefore, using this option may pro‐
	     duce unexpected results, but it will speed up parsing of mes‐
	     sages.
     -x	     Show folders with leading dots in the name as well. In Unix using
	     a dot as first character usually means that the file is hidden in
	     normal directory listings.
     -# number
	     Pad the last output field (total messages) to number spaces. The
	     default is 4.

     The behaviour of this program can be further tweaked using environment
     variables: see ENVIRONMENT below.

ARGUMENTS
     One or more arguments may be entered: these should be the filenames of
     the folders you want to parse. If arguments are specified, only these
     folders are checked and your default folders will be ignored.  Wildcard
     expansion (glob-style) is performed on the arguments.

SUPPORTED FORMATS
     chk4mail recognizes five different mailbox formats: mbox, MMDF, MH,
     Maildir and Extended Maildir. The mailbox type is autodetected, so there
     is no need to use a flag for different mailbox types.

     mbox    This mailbox format is most common. The mailfolder consists of a
	     single file containing all messages. Each message starts with a
	     line of the form:

	     Unfortunately these ‘From ’ lines are not always quoted properly
	     in the message body. That is why chk4mail takes the
	     ‘Content-Length’ header into account, where-ever possible.

     MMDF    This is a variant of the mbox format. It has a clearer way of
	     seperating messages: Each message is surrounded by lines contain‐
	     ing ‘^A^A^A^A’.

     MH	     A mailfolder consists of a directory and each message is stored
	     in a separate file. The filename indicates the message number.
	     Deleted files are renamed by prepending a comma to the filename.
	     Whether a file is unread should be indicated in the .mh_sequences
	     file. However as neither procmail(1) nor mutt(1) update this,
	     there is no point in checking it. So the number of new messages
	     in these folder is always unknown, and a question mark is shown
	     instead.

     Maildir
	     A newer mailfolder format, which is (can be) used by qmail(1) and
	     procmail(1).  Like MH directories are used for the mailfolders,
	     however it adds three subdirectories for the mailfolder: tmp, new
	     and cur. As filenames for the messages, the message-id of the
	     mail is used, so it should always be unique, and file locking is
	     not needed.

     Extended Maildir
	     A format used by Courier MTA, but not recognized by qmail or
	     procmail.	This is an extension of the Maildir format whereby
	     each maildir may contain one or more subfolders (all subfolders
	     also contain tmp, new, cur directories). These subfolders do not
	     have subsubfolders, but a dot seperator can be used to indicate a
	     hierarchy: so .Sent.2004 and .Sent.2005 indicate two parts of the
	     Sent subfolder.

     Remember that procmail(1) can use only three of these mailbox formats:
     mbox (‘folder’), MH (‘folder/.’) and Maildir (‘folder/’).	However
     mutt(1) supports all five formats.

NOTES
     Empty files, filenames not starting with a lowercase character, symbolic
     links and special devices will be ignored. However files containing dots
     as well as subdirectories are treated as mailfolders. If you don't like
     this, then you shouldn't put these in your maildirectory!

     There is no fall-back for an incoming folder. When the ${MAIL} variable
     is not set, we simply assume all the folders are in the maildirectory.
     When you don't have a maildirectory either, there is little point in
     using this utility. This may be a bit confusing because mail readers like
     mutt(1) and elm(1) usually do have a fall-back default, which is deter‐
     mined at compile-time. This is usually something like /var/mail/${USER}.

     The ${MAILPATH} environment variable will be ignored if it is set. This
     is not a bug.  Having to list 50 full pathnames in a variable just to get
     your mail program to function is rediculous.

     To be somewhat compatible with frm(1) and nfrm(1) chk4mail will behave
     completely different when it is run as frm or nfrm: in this case it will
     display a list with the senders and subjects of the (new) messages in
     your standard inbox. The output may not be completely compatible and the
     command line options of frm(1) are not supported.

ENVIRONMENT
     HOME    Full path of the user's home directory. This is used to determine
	     the directory where the user's mailfolders reside. By default the
	     subdirectory Mail is used; if this does not exist then the direc‐
	     tory mail is used instead.
     MAIL    Full path of the user's default incoming mailfolder.
     MAIL_UNREAD_AS_OLD
	     On popular demand, setting this variable will do the same as the
	     -u command line option.
     CHK4MAIL_OPTIONS
	     This variable allows you to set default options for chk4mail.
	     You should use options the same way as you would do on the com‐
	     mand line.

SEE ALSO
     chkimap(1)

AUTHOR
     Johan van Selst ⟨johans@stack.nl⟩

BUGS
     By default this program does not make any distinction between new and
     unread messages. This is a feature, not a bug. See the -u option.

     In the unlikely event that the program doesn't behave the way it is sup‐
     posed to, you can always contact the author.

chk4mail			 March 1, 2006			      chk4mail
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