Wanted: New Mail Flag

[Jerry Bakin <Jerry@blue-jaunte.inference.dialnet.symbolics.com>]

Does anyone have a nice hack (or even know of a supported feature) which
acts to notify the user (flashing screen, bell, melting screen, etc)
when new mail has arrived?

I recently started having VMS forward all of my mail to my machine.
However, I cannot figure out how to get mail to shout whenever I have
new mail.

I have seen a Sun hack which is real cute.  The mailbox icon changes
from an empty mailbox to one with a flag raised.  (If you open it, it
has the latest zork status in it and a postcard from J. Pierpont
Flathead :)  This would be cute, especially if it appeared in the
"unused" margins of the screen and could not be covered up.

I know, I know I saw a listing of something which notifies the user from
the background, but after looking through volumes 0,1,4 and 6 and the
7.0 and 7.1 patch notes, bulletins, etc.; I cannot find it now.

One cannot simply call zwei:com-check-for-new-mail in the background
because it depends upon an environment to be set up for it.

I could easily write something to check the last time any mailbox from
some list was changed, but this would ping on any change not just
addition of a new message.  It would be nice to have the "flag lowered"
automatically as the message is read.

If I knew more (like if it were documented) about the protocol used to
spread mail around, I could write an after message, or whopper or advice
to raise the flag when a message came in and the user was logged in.
This would seem to be the best approach.  When "Get Inbox" was clicked
on the appropriate mailbox, the flag could be lowered.

There is not enough documentation for me to start on this.

Does anyone have a hack or a hint?

Thanks,

Jerry Bakin.
<bakin%w.inference.dialnet.symbolics.com@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com>