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From: Henrik Carlqvist on 13 Aug 2010 17:35
With Slackware 13.1 and KDE4 I soon found that I needed som kind of biff
program to notify me when there is new mail in my local mailbox
/var/mail/$USER. With Slackware 12 and KDE3 I used korn for this and I
also know there is a program called kbiff.

KDE4 has many nice plasmoids and also some mail notifier plasmoids.
However all of those mail notifiers are for remote services like gmail or
imap servers. I need a notifier for the local mailbox.

Some googling showed that I was not the only one missing korn, but I
couldn't with google find any good solution. However, I now have a
workaround:

I use gnubiff from http://gnubiff.sourceforge.net/
To build gnubiff on Slackware 13.1 I pass the option --disable-gnome to
the configure script. Gnubiff is no plasmoid, but there is a plasmoid for
the System Tray and gnubiff can be placed in the system tray if started
with the option --systemtray.

Unfortunately the icons included with gnubiff are too big for the space
given to gnubiff in the system tray. It seems as if gnubiff gets 22x22
pixels in the system tray but uses a frame with 2 pixels width. This
leaves room for a 18x18 icon. I have made an icon brevlada18.png for no
new email and another icon post(18x18).png which gets animated when there
is new email. Those icons are uploaded at http://poolhem.se/bilder/gnubiff/

For me gnubiff seems to work really great. However, I have found that the
default setting of local_fam_enable in the expert options is not reliable.
Maybe I get problems because /var/mail is an automounted NFS directory.
Reverting to polling solves this problem.

I hope this hint about gnubiff can be to some help to others which like me
is looking for this functionality in KDE4.

regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc123(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root(a)localhost postmaster(a)localhost

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