If another program (typically either Mail.app or another appnmail process) has locked a mailbox which the program tries to access, it will sleep for 10 seconds and try again until the mailbox has become available. If appnmail is invoked with the -n option a warning message will be given instead and the mailbox skipped.
By default appended messages are marked as unread. The -r , -d and -f options will cause the message to be marked read, deleted or flagged respectively. The -p option allows the user to override the default priority level of the message. Valid values are 0 for no priority, 1 for highest priority and 2 for second highest priority, and so on. Adding the option -v causes appnmail to be more verbose about what it does.
Appnmail works both with NeXTmail and standard mail.
Append a mailbox filed called `msg' to the Mailboxes OldMail and Outgoing:
appnmail -m <msg OldMail Outgoing
Typical lines to use in a ~/.procmailrc to append all messages from the NeXT programmers list to the mailbox NeXT. (Before you use this make sure that appnmail is in the path specified at the beginning of the ~/.procmailrc file.):
: ^From next-prog-request@cpac.washington.edu |appnmail NeXT
If appnmail is used in conjunction with a mail delivery package like procmail, it is worth noting that it shouldn't be used to put mail in the Active mailbox. Most users will keep the Active mailbox opened and locked in Mail.app whenever they are logged in at the console, so mail intended for this mailbox would remain queued until the user logs out. Instead mail intended for the Active mailbox should be put into the mail spool directory as it normally would be done by default.
`Message is not in UNIX mailbox format' if the message on the standard input doesn't begin with the strings `From '. This occurs for example when trying to find raw mh messages to appnmail.
The task was made considerably easier by Chris Paris <cap+@cmu.edu> decoding of the Mail.app transmission and storage formats.