I got bored of mutt getting my mailboxes wrong. I use ifile to automatically filter my incoming mail into the right mailboxes (see here for details), so I have a large number of incoming mailboxes. I need a simple screen which allows me to see all my mailboxes, how many messages are in each, whether or not there are any new messages, and launch mutt into the right mailbox as I select it.

mfront is a little wrapper script which I use instead of mutt. I leave it running all the time in a screen session. It notices my incoming mail the moment it arrives and highlights the right mailbox. I can press to cycle between mailboxes with new mail and then hit to enter the right one.

Why not use mutt's 'mailboxes' feature? It relies on access times to determine which mailboxes have new messages. The 'buffy-size' option goes some way to repair this, but it doesn't automatically update itself on new mail as far as I can see. Anyway, mfront works and it's very simple.

Features

• Reports accurately the number of messages, new messages and important messages in each folder
• Configurable colors
• Supports sorting of the mailbox list - alphanumeric/date last modified/unsorted
• Support manual refresh of the mailbox list

Planned improvements

• Support hierarchical directory structure as well as flat structure
• Support categorisation of folders (important, spam, etc)
• Support 'thresholds' for folders so that you don't skip to a mailing list folder unless there are e.g. 5 new mails in it.

Download mfront here. Requires perl, ncurses, and probably not much else. Pick up the latest version of the script and a sample .mfrontrc (not required)