🚀 go-pugleaf

malcolm@demon.net "Malcolm Muir" writes:
-John de Rivaz (John@longevb.demon.co.uk) wrote:
-> The DOS package with Demon has a feature that lists each of your 
-> mailboxes and show how many unread messages are present. Does anyone now 
-> how this works? I tried to write a little application in Visual Basic to 
-> do the same, and variations in mail headers always seem to fool it.
-> 
-> I opened each *.txt file of email and read it line by line as follows:
....
-> Maybe I am doing something stupid, but I can be attempting the 
-> impossible as the DOS package already does it.
-
-You are counting messages the wrong way. Each new message in a
-mailbox starts with the line 'From ' (note there is no ':')
-
-Count the number of 'From ' lines and the number of 'Status: R'
-lines. Subtract one from the other.

From experience this process gets screwed up, by paragraphs like this one,
because the start of the paragraph is '<newline><newline>From' which is the
SAME as the way the DOS package reads the start of a message.

The addendum I would make is that the next line contains a valid header code
to be a bit safer on counting the 'From' by counting 'From' plus next line has
started with 'RFC822 keyword:' then do the subtraction as before.

-- 
Paul Carpenter		| paul@pcserv.demon.co.uk
    Consulting for General, Scientific, Industrial Computing & more..
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