Re: time.el and display-time-mail-function

[Richard M. Stallman]

    where display-time-mail-function is a user-definable function, which
    seems like the perfect thing for my situation.  The problem is the
    "or" -- if my display-time-mail-function returns nil (to indicate that
    there is no new mail), instead of stopping there, it will continue
    with the standard mail-spool-file check.

Why do you think that is undesirable?

    Does this seem like a reasonable change to make?  It seems that,
    without this change, display-time-mail-function is useless.

It is not useless.  It gives you a way to check for mail
in some other place.

If there's no mail in the other place, but there is mail
in the standard place, the current code will say you have mail.
Why is that a problem?