Showing the number of new emails as part of the graphical greeter

[Dennis van Dok <dvandok quicknet nl>]

Hi,

I have a wish-list item for GDM and I'm willing to (help) code it.

In the graphical greeter, all users are shown in a list with their 
faces (if they have set them). Besides the user name, I would like to 
see the number of unread emails.

I used to have a setup with xdm and a few personal additions. One of 
them was a xbuffy (run by root), monitoring the mail spool of both 
users (me and my wife). My wife found this extremely convenient, as she 
didn't receive mail very often, and this saved her an unnecessary login 
to find out.

Things changed when
a) I turned to gdm, and
b) I turned to using Maildir instead of the ol' unix mailbox.

We miss the functionality now. I couldn't find a replacement for xbuffy 
that handles Maildir format. Besides, running something like that on 
the graphical gdm greeter looks clunky anyway.

So if anyone has a suggestion on where I should start, or e.g. how to 
fit it into Gnome's architecture, feel free to comment.

regards,

Dennis van Dok