mutt/procmail mailbox modification times

[David Hart]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 07:09:20AM +0100, Goran Ristic wrote:

> On Sat, 03 Dec 2005, David Hart wrote:
> 
> >I'm surprised that with the number of Mutt users on this list that
> >nobody else has confirmed this yet as visiting two dozen or more
> >mailboxes to check for new mail makes Mutt virtually unusable.
> :) I think, thats because they _only_ use mutt? 
> 
> In fact: When I enter a maildir, read just only some messages, quit and come
> back, the mailbox does not show that there is still unread mail in.

No, that's _normal_ mutt behaviour.  Mutt updates the access time
of the folder/file when you leave it.  It detects new mail in a folder
from the directory view (and when you hit 'c' to change folder) by
comparing the mtime and atime - read it here:

http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual/manual-3.html#ss3.12

    Note: new mail is detected by comparing the last modification
    time to the last access time. Utilities like biff or frm or any
    other program which accesses the mailbox might cause Mutt to
    never detect new mail for that mailbox if they do not properly
    reset the access time. Backup tools are another common reason
    for updated access times.

I didn't know that it used the same method to detect changes in
maildirs (as I've only ever used maildir on imap servers), ... but
now I know it does ;)

I was watching my mail folder with a 'watch -d -n1 "ls -l; ls -lu"'
and as far as I could tell the atime was changing in step with the
mtime as mail was being delivered - so I wasn't seeing _any_ new mail
in Mutt. (I've since discovered that you can set the time interval on
'watch' down to 0.1sec)

But thankfully, (big sigh), I've found what the problem was.  I was
running the Beagle search deamon on the Breezy boxes that I checked.
Beagle (making use of, I believe, the inotify patches in the kernel)
was indexing the mails as fast as they were being delivered.

I've now stopped Beagle indexing my mail folder and Mutt works again
:) Shame to loose indexing of mails though :(  Does anyone have any
ideas to work around it (apart from not using Mutt :)

Thanks to both of you who replied.

-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>