Bash has this feature of notifying you when you have new mail. The MAIL env. var. needs to be set to include the mail folders that need to be checked for new mail. On my system, I have included some of my Pine folders (e. g. $HOME/mail/linuxers) in $MAIL.

I would like to know how bash "checks for new mail". Does it just use the "last accessed time"? I am sorry, I couldn't find any info on this in the manpage.

My problem: After getting the notification ("You have new mail in linuxers") and reading the new message(s) using Pine, bash _again_ tells me that I have new mail. I suspect it just uses the last access time, which makes it so dumb in my case, because the message gets "marked as read/old" (thus modifying the mail folder file) since I have _just_read_it_.

In short, it notifies me twice, once when I have new mail, and again when the mail has just been read.

Any of you guys using this? How do you cope with it?

Manish

PS: I run fetchmail in daemon mode, so mail notification on the command line is cool for me.