Hacking Gmail

138 Part II — Getting Inside Gmail
my $new_msgs = 0;
if ( defined($messages) ) {
foreach ( @{$messages} ) {
if ( $_->{‘new’} ) {
$new_msgs++;
}
}
}
This leaves you with the variable $new_msgs to give you the number of unread
messages in the Inbox. Listing 8-1 gives an entire working script to display this.
Listing 8-1: Checking the New Mail Count in Perl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Mail::Webmail::Gmail;
my $gmail = Mail::Webmail::Gmail->new(
username => “ben.hammersley\@gmail.com”,
password => “XXXXXXXX”,
);
my $messages =
$gmail->get_messages( label =>
$Mail::Webmail::Gmail::FOLDERS{‘INBOX’} );
my $new_msgs = 0;
if ( defined($messages) ) {
foreach ( @{$messages} ) {
if ( $_->{‘new’} ) {
$new_msgs++;
}
}
}
print “you have $new_msgs new messages in your inbox\n”;
Obviously, from here you can build out to produce all sorts of interesting alerts, as
you shall do later on in this chapter.
An alternative and easier way of doing this can be found in Listing 8-2.