What is faces?

Faces is a Gtk+ program for monitoring a list visually. Typically this is a list of incoming mail messages. IMAP and POP mailbox formats are supported.

Faces has three different modes of operation:

(a) The default will monitor for new mail. By default, only the last ten messages are displayed. Using the left mouse button it is possible to toggle the text in the faces window. This will either be the username or the time the mail message arrived. The icon shows the image of the last message to arrive.

(b) You can monitor the whole of a mail file. The open window will automatically adjust it's size to correctly show the face icons. The open window options are the username or the timestamp and number of message from that user. The icon will display the image of the last message, and a count of the total number of messages in the spool file or mail folder.

(c) Custom monitoring. You can specify a program or shell script to run. The standard output from this program will be read by the faces program, and the appropriate faces displayed using the information provided. The format of this face information is given in the faces manual page.

There are lots of good examples that have already been written and these can be downloaded from: ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/src/

There is a huge database of existing picons (personal icons or "faces") available for use with the faces program at:

ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/db

Included with this release, is the ability to include a face image with your mail message using an X-Face header line (plus continuation lines). Faces expects this line to be in a certain compressed format, and uncompresses it, and displays that image on-the-fly.

Audio capabilities are also provided as a conditional compilation option.

By default, after every sixty seconds, faces will recheck the mail file. If the mail spool file has changed size, it will produce a chain of records for which it has face icons.

This release contains only a graphical interface for Gtk.

Faces is based on the AT&T v8 face server called vismon, but is not derived from vismon sources.

This project is hosted at Sourceforge and you can go to the project pages to submit bugs, access CVS , etc.  Mailing lists are available for you to ask questions and to help keep you informed of the progress being made.

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