New mail notification in systray

To be notified of new mail with a systray icon one can use mail-notification from ports. It doesn’t integrate with the mail client, instead it’s a separate application that checks the accounts you set up in it for new mail and displays a notification in systray and a popup with From/To/Subject. Clicking on it opens the email client.

When it’s started it’ll display the properties page if it wasn’t set up before, if it has at least one account set up it won’t display anything unless you got new mail. In order to see the properties page again either right click on systray icon or do

mail-notification -p

in a terminal and you’ll be able to change the settings or add a new account.

To see all the options,

mail-notification --help

If there’s an error when starting it, saying something like

** (mail-notification:15475): WARNING **: cannot find default value of configuration key "/apps/mail-notification/commands/new-mail/enabled"

send SIGHUP to gconfd or gconfd-2. Example:

$ ps aux | grep gconfd
username 14092 0.0 0.3 28516 8012 ?? S 9:44AM 0:00.59 /usr/local/libexec/gconfd-2
username 14477 0.0 0.0 9124 1476 3 S+ 10:57AM 0:00.00 grep gconfd
$ kill -s HUP 14092
$

Start as

$ mail-notification --sm-disable

in Gnome, otherwise it doesn’t work properly. It might already be set up like that in Startup Applications.