Do you also sometimes find yourself desperately checking for new emails, afraid as you are to miss anything? Well, that time is over now, with the extremely handy Mail Watcher Panel plugin! If you set it up correctly, you can get it to notify you of new messages in a nice popup balloon and gives you easy access to your email.
Of course, the first step is to add this plugin. Not that difficult: right click a panel, “Add New Item”, then in that window select “Mail Watcher”, then click “Add”.
You then get the “Edit Properties” window. In this window you can select what type of email you want to watch by clicking “Add”.
Now, that’s very cool and all, that it checks your e-mail, but we’d like to go a bit further. First, we want it to open our email when we click the Mail Watcher icon. If you use some kind of web mail, e.g. Gmail, then we can set the “Run on click” command to firefox -new-tab http://gmail.com
That will open a new tab in Firefox that will display your email. If you use an email program like Thunderbird, you can set this command to that program, e.g.: thunderbird
Now that we have that set, let’s set the coolest feature – the notification balloon! First, we will need to have libnotify-bin installed, so fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install that. Then we can add the “Run on new messages” command: notify-send "New mail" "You have new messages in your inbox" -i xfce-newmail
Tada! Now you are all set and will be notified when you receive a new email.
I tried it and it didn’t work right away. The package libnotify-bin is required, because it provides the notify-send tool.
Good trick nonetheless. 🙂
Another tip:
Adding –icon=xfce-newmail to the “Run on new messages” command will make the notification a bit cooler. 🙂
Bas, as for your fist comment, didn’t I say:
The icon is a nice tip. For one reason or another, WordPress replaces double dashed with a single one, so
--icon=xfce-newmail
needs to have two dashes at the beginning! Or you could just say-i xfce-newmail
I’ve added it to the post.
I must have missed that bit. My bad. 🙂
Cool idea!
I never thought about adding the notification. Thanks!
Doesn’t work with multiple (&-separated) commands. None of them will run.
Any way to have it tell you who the mail is from and what it is about?
Back in the day apparently not, and I think this is still the case. Perhaps you could set notifications in Thunderbird or another client though.
I found that once I set the gnome-keyring demon to start automatically I can use Mail Notifications (a gnome app). It does exactly what I want.
Hi,
I’d like to have new mails considered as read (in thunderbird) if I click on the mail notification icon. Which command (to be executed if you click on the icon) is the right one? It should be something like “thunderbird [[account that is affected]] [[command to consider new mails as read]]”.
Thanks,
Daniel
In the last message, I forgot to click on “Notify me of follow-up comments via email”. Now I did that.
Hi Daniel, I don’t use Thunderbird myself but I’ve done some Googling for what command line options Thunderbird takes. Unfortunately, it seems that mark all messages as read is not an option that is available, making this function pretty much impossible to use with this feature without programming.
Yes I think you’re right. Perhaps I will ask that same question in a forum on thunderbird, and eventually propose to include an option like that in future versions of thunderbird.
Thank you.
Nice tool – it just shows unread mails instead of new mails. Is there some way to configure this?
Sorry, this tool does not support that. You might want to look into other email notification apps.
Gmail service now complains that this tool is ‘not secure enough’ and blocks it.
I’ve put a little script + howto on how to get secure mail checker for gmail in xfce, feel free to check it out: https://github.com/arteq/xfce_gmail