Simple biff for gmail

Gmail publishes an atom feed for your inbox. This makes it possible to build a trivial client to show the number of unread messages in your inbox, for use in a statusbar (dwm/wmii bar, conky, etc).

The following shell one-liner does the job, but slowly:

  wget -qO - https://username:password@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom --no-check-certificate \
     | egrep '[0-9]+' \
     | sed -e 's/[^0-9]//g'

Here's a simple perl script that is about twice as fast:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  use strict;
  use warnings;

  use XML::Atom::Client;

  my $api = XML::Atom::Client->new;

  $api->username('username');
  $api->password('password');

  my $feed = $api->getFeed('https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom')
    or die ("Error: ", $api->errstr, "\n");

  print(scalar($feed->entries)||0, "\n");

On ArchLinux this required the following packages: perl-xml-atom, perl-libwww, perl-digest-sha1, perl-datetime, perl-crypt-ssleay.