What is Pop3eye?

Pop3eye is a pop3 email notifier, previewer and spam deleter. It can be run as a dockapp or as a regular or undecorated window that pops up when checking email. 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. It can display up to 20 partial lines of the email body in a tooltip window. Any number of accounts can be monitored and each can have its own color and font scheme.

Pop3eye 0.6 has undergone heavy reworking of regular expression pattern matching. You can setup expressions to match on any header line and then show or hide the email, or delete emails from the server without downloading them. A log of deleted emails can be kept. You can set "test-delete" until satisfied with its operation.

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 clicking on one account retrieves only for that account. Right clicking during retrieval will abort.

If your pop3 server supports UIDL, already downloaded headers and body text will not be downloaded again unless some emails have been deleted. You can force it to download with "shift-right-click".

.pop3eyerc keywords:

New in 0.6.1: border-color, border-width, tooltip-bg-pattern now holds an xpm filename and 2 minor bug fixes.
New in 0.6.2: Minor bug fix. It would falsely show there were deleted emails when there were none.

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: libXpm libX11 libpthread.

For apop libgcrypt, for line editing in popdelete libreadline libncurses.

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

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 reject, 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 delete emails with objectionable subject lines:

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

You can see which emails were deleted by setting "show-deleted yes" in the config file or by clicking on the "D" button to toggle this switch. They will be displayed in red in the main window and with a red X in the tooltip.

A useful (but possibly risky) technique is to select to show emails from people or with subjects you want to receive, and delete all others:

As said above, this can be risky. A better way is to use the included "popdelete" program which gives you the opportunity to review and revise your deletions. See below.

Matching can be inverted:

This is similar to using "hide". The difference is that inverted "show" emails become unmarked and can 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 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, and emails. The default colors for the from and subject lines are green if marked "show", blue if "hidden", red if "deleted", and brown if not marked.

Tooltip popup settings:

The default colors can be changed with the keywords:

The default tooltip colors can be changed with these keywords:

The tooltip can have a background pattern. There is one pattern compiled in (tooltip.xpm). You can modify it and re-compile, if you like.

The tooltip can have a shadow.

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 this out. 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.

You can abort retrieval by sending SIGALRM. 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.

The program popdelete is included. With it you may delete mail on your pop account before retrieval based on regular expressions. Usage:

popdelete [ -C config file -s server-name -u username -p password --confirm=yes/no --highlight ansi ]

Popdelete can read the same config file as pop3eye, but you probably will want to use a separate one with different regular expressions. In this file, "keep" is a synonym for and is clearer than "show".

Popdelete will list emails it will not delete, followed by highlighted emails it will delete and (if "confirm yes") let you review them. At this point, you may delete them or select individual emails to keep. If "confirm no", then deletion will be automatic (although you will be warned and you can abort with Control-C).

This ANSI string will highlight emails to be deleted in red.
Note that you do not need to include the leading ^[.

highlight [1;31m

Sometimes there will be emails marked for deletion that you want to keep or there may be ones you wish to delete. For this, there is 'K'eep and 'D'elete. When asked to confirm, press 'K' or 'D' and Enter or Space. Then enter the email numbers or range of numbers (like 3-7) and press enter. A new list of emails to delete will be displayed.

Type popdelete -h for more info.

Included also is popretrieve which can be used to retrieve selected emails and send output to stdout.

• 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.

Add Imap support. (I do not have access to an Imap server)

Add email deletion on server. Done!

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