What is Pop3eye?

Pop3eye is a pop3 email notifier plus previewer, retriever and spam deleter. It can be run in a dock, a regular window or a window with a custom background. Pop3eye is multi-threaded, any number of accounts can be checked simultaneously.

Tip: A scrollwheel vastly improves Pop3eye's usability by allowing you to quickly scroll through messages.

Pop3eye can:

• Notify you of email from specific people, with certain subjects, or with information in any other header line by using regular expressions as filters.
• Display up to 20 partial lines of the email body in a tooltip window.
• Retrieve marked emails to a local file.
• Delete marked emails from the server.
• Monitor any number of accounts each with its own color scheme.

A portion of the "From:" and "Subject:" lines are displayed as they are retrieved. Afterward, only those marked "show" will be seen. Mouse actions affect only the account under the mouse. Right click on an account to retrieve headers, retrieve and save emails marked "retrieve" or delete those marked "delete". Emails marked both "to-be-retrieved" and "to-be-deleted" will be first retrieved and then deleted ONLY if successfully retrieved. Right click again to abort.

Note: Your pop3 server must support UIDL for actions on marked emails to function.

To get a quick look, just type:

Note: A precompiled binary without apop support is included. Compiled under Fedora Core 2.

Extract the archive, cd into the pop3eye directory and type "make". Then as root, "make install". Or, you may the copy the pop3eye executable to any location in your path.

Required libraries: X11 ImLib png pthread. For apop support, libgcrypt and libgcrypt-devel.

To compile with apop capabilities, edit the Makefile to include -DHAVE_GCRYPT. You must have gcrypt and gcrypt-devel installed. If your linux box has polling (poll function defined in include/sys/poll.h) compile with -DHAVE_POLLING.

All settings are done in the ~/.pop3eye/rc file. Most have reasonable defaults. Edit the supplied sample.pop3eyerc file with your own settings.

You must set these:

For more accounts, simply repeat.

To set the number of accounts displayed at one time:

Some items (like accounts-shown) must be set just once before the first account name. See below. If an account specific item is set before the first account name, it will affect all accounts. But, that can be over-ridden in each account.

One of Pop3eye's most useful features is the ability to filter emails using regular expressions. Filter by subject, sender or any other header line, like X-Priority:, CC:, Date: or Return-Path:.

Regular expression examples:

To show emails from certain people, you might use:

To conceal, use hide:

This will not show emails whose subject line contain OCLUG, viagra, prescription, mortgage.

"nocase" may be used for case insensitive matching:

This allows matches for CC: sawfish, Cc: sawfish, CC: Sawfish etc.

To automatically mark "to-be-deleted" emails with objectionable subject lines:

This will mark "to-be-deleted" (from the server) emails with the above words in the subject line, unless they have been marked as "show" or "hide".

You can also mark or unmark emails to delete by clicking on the "D" button. You can show/hide emails marked "to-be-deleted" by setting "show-to-be-deleted yes/no" in the config file They will be displayed with a red line drawn through the From line in the main window and in the tooltip.

You may find it useful to select to show emails from people or with subjects you want to receive, and mark "to-be-deleted" all others:

Again, emails will not be deleted until you right-click on the account.

Matching can be inverted:

This is similar to using "hide". The difference is that inverted "show" emails become unmarked and can be marked "to-be-deleted", but emails marked "hide" cannot.

You can use multiple lines of patterns:

If your email client marks mail as read by setting "Status: R" in the header, you can have these not shown with this:

Pattern matching works like this:

Each header line is compared to all your "show" patterns, then your "hide" patterns and then, if it is not marked show or hide, your "delete" patterns. Comparisions for each show, hide or delete stop on an inverted match. This means that an email with "From: rnader@att.com" and these patterns:

will not be shown.

Each header line is compared to your regular expressions. In the case where more than one expression matches a single header line, comparing continues to the end or until there is an inverted match. No email that has matched as "show" or "hide" will be marked "to-be-deleted".

Note: Filtering occurs even if "use-patterns no". This is only for displaying emails.

For more on regular expressions use "info regex" or try the Regex Tutorial at www.silverstones.com/thebat/Regex.html.

The tooltip window is displayed when new mail arrives or when the mouse enters the main window. It will display account information, next check time, error messages and emails. The default colors for the "From:" and "Subject:" lines are green if marked "show", blue if "hidden", red if "to-be-deleted", and brown if not marked.

Tooltip popup settings:

The default marking colors can be changed with the keywords:

The default tooltip colors can be changed with these keywords:

Note: Each account can have its own popup and color settings. One account can have a grey background while another has cornsilk. One can have "tooltips 1" and another "tooltips 2".

The tooltip can have a background image.

Note: If there is no transparency in the image, it will be used as a pattern.

The tooltip can have a shadow. (Only useful if no background image is used.)

Up to 20 partial lines of the email can be displayed. Since many emails contain HTML code, a "body" regular expression can be used to filter out some of this. This default will eliminate most of it:

The font used in the tooltip is set with the tooltip-font keyword. You can decrease the font size down to 8px (and thus increase the amount of email body displayed) with either control-scrollwheel or the control-< popup button.

More detailed connection errors are also displayed in the tooltip.

Select the email you wish to delete or retrieve by clicking on the < or > buttons or using the scrollwheel and click on the D or R button. Mark all emails you want and Right-Click to logon. The marked emails will be deleted or retrieved, or both. Emails marked both "to-be-retrieved" and "to-be-deleted" will be first retrieved and then deleted ONLY if successfully retrieved.

Pop3eye can monitor any number of accounts and can display all at once or cycle through them. For example, you could have 6 accounts and display them one at a time. Or, display 2 accounts at a time showing accounts 1 and 2, then 3 and 4, then 5 and 6, then repeat. Or, display 3 and show 1, 2, and 3, then 4, 5 and 6. The scrollwheel is very useful for cycling the multiple accounts.

Pop3eye automatically cycles through all accounts and messages at a speed set by "display-interval". This stops when you start scrolling or clicking through messages and resumes when you leave the window. If the buttons are displayed, it will not switch accounts.

Set the main window font with "font font-description". Set the font to use when the mouse is over an account with "mouse-over-font font-description". Set the tooltip font with "tooltip-font font-description".

The colors of the texts "messages", "info", "hide", "show", "delete", and "retrieve" may also be set. See the Configuration File section below.

If you are using a custom image, you may need to adjust the position of the text in both the main window and in the tooltip. Use "xoffset x" and "yoffset y" for the main window and "tt-xoffset x" and "tt-yoffset y" for the tooltip. The x y values are relative to the top left corner of Pop3eye or the tooltip.

An image can be displayed when new mail arrives. Each account can have its own image and location. Use "new-mail-image filename" and "new-mail-xoffset x coord" and "new-mail-yoffset y coord". The x y values are relative to the top left corner of Pop3eye.

Sending SIGUSR1 will raise/lower the window.

Sending SIGUSR2 will re-read the configuration file.

You can do a "quick reply" to the currently displayed email, but you must supply the email client and a format string. Pop3eye will insert the "To:" address and "Subject:" line where there is a "%s". For example, in replying to "sam@hell.com" with a subject of "hey there", "sam@hell.com" will be passed to the first "%s" and "hey there" to the second. In the following, Xterm will execute mysmtp script and pass those values to it. mysmtp will execute smtpclient which does the actual mail transmission.

reply xterm -geometry 70x20+360+230 -e mysmtp "%s" "whoknows@frys.com" "%s"

See the script "mysmtp" for more information.

Smtpclient can be found here.

• Almost all options are the same as the config file keywords. Some have short form alternatives.
• "server pop.mail.com" would be "--server pop.mail.com" on the command line.
• Command line options will override the config file.

• Blank lines and lines beginning with # are ignored.
• Most items can be overridden on the command line.
• The first items are general and pertain to all accounts.
• Individual accounts follow the line: "account account-name".
• Regular expressions apply only to the account they are in.
• All other account specific items are global if they precede the first account.

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