• Procmail_and_Festival

Too lazy to bother checking your email?

Would you rather have somebody announce new mail but can't afford an assistant?

Using procmail and festival you can do just that.

I added the following to .procmailrc

 SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject: \
 | expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
 SENDER=`formail -xFrom: \
 | expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`

 :0 c:
 | echo "New mail from " $SENDER ". the subject is "   
   $SUBJECT | text2wave | aplay -Djackplug

You may have to change the last part to met your configuration

Now when I get new mail, I hear

"New Mail from address, the subject is blah..blah"

What's that you say? Your mail is read on a shell server far away from the computer you're sitting at? A nice combination of netcat and inetd ( or xinetd) will handle this just fine.

Replace the procmail recipe with:

 :0 c:
 | echo "New mail from " $SENDER ". the subject is "   
   $SUBJECT | netcat ${WORKSTATION} ${PORT}

Then, add a configuration for your (x)inetd config to take that input and push it through festival:

 PORT stream tcp nowait someone_not_root "/bin/bash -c 'text2wave | aplay'"

Adjust the inetd as need for your configuration and for security purposes