If you’ve not been following along, you might have missed it: it appears to me that even today, in 2011, mail systems work much better when setup the old way. Meaning with a local MTA for outgoing mail. With some niceties, such as sender dependent relayhost maps.

That’s why I needed M-x mailq to display the mail queue and have some easy shortcuts in order to operate it (mainly f runs the command mailq-mode-flush, but per site and per id delivery are useful too).

Now, I also happen to setup outgoing mail routes to walk through an SSH tunnel, which thanks to both ~/.ssh/config and cssh ( C-= runs the command cssh-term-remote-open, with completion) is a couple of keystrokes away to start. Well it still happens to me to forget about starting it, which causes mails to hold in a queue until I realise it’s not delivered, which always take just about too long.

A solution I’ve been thinking about is to add a little flag in the modeline in my gnus *Group* and *Summary* buffers. The flag would show up as ✔ when no mail is queued and waiting for me to open the tunnel, or ✘ as soon as the queue is not empty. Here’s what it looks like here:

Well I’m pretty happy with the setup. The flag is refreshed every minute, and here’s as an example how I did setup mailq in my el-get-sources setup:

(:name mailq
		:after (lambda () (mailq-modeline-display)))

I’m not sure how many of you dear readers are using a local MTA to deliver your mails, but well, the ones who do (or consider doing so) might even find this article useful!