2y ago

Is there an easy way to set up an email client so you get system notifications in GNOME once you receive an e-mail?

As simple as the title sounds I'm having huge trouble getting that working.

Thunderbird only fetches new mail while it's open.

Who the heck knows how to get evolution/geary to play nice with business gmail/protonmail.

Does anyone have a simple way of solving this problem?

edit. Also, somewhat related, is there a good looking, simple e-mail client? Thunderbird looks busy. Geary kinda looks okay but I cant get it to work at all.

30 comments

Birdtray sounds like what you're looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.

Evolution work fine with a business google account. I couldn't use gnome online accounts as that's blocked by policy, but regular imap worked just fine.
- . I couldn’t use gnome online accounts as that’s blocked by policy
  Oh that explains a lot, thank you.

Why you don't use Evolution and/or Geary?
They are basicly made for Gnome.
- Geary has so many bugs and going to Gitlab to report the bug, you'll find matching issues for the same bug dating back multiple years.
  Geary also doesn't offer a option for user to pull/refresh emails. Getting a 2FA code via email and waiting minutes to get the email to show up on Geary was painful.
  The only thing I liked about Geary was it's notifications integration in Gnome
  
  It used to be a buggy mess, but it has become pretty stable in recent years. I'm using it daily and can't remember the last time I encountered a severe bug.
  
  I'm using it for two years with zero problems.
  It has all the necessity for me unless direct PGP support.
  
  I honestly don't understand how anyone uses it, it's just about the fastest I've ever uninstalled an application.

Procmail for the old school win.

gmail
I don't know much about Gmail but I'm quite certain, that you only have to enable IMAP/SMTP in Gmail settings.
protonmail.
Install the Proton Mail Bridge and connect to the IMAP/SMTP server on localhost (ports 1143 and 1025).
Does anyone have a simple way of solving this problem?
I had only minor problems getting the above to work. Anyway., for Protonmail there is ElectronMail. It's available as Flatpak too and it minimizes/starts to tray.
- I can get the clients to fetch the e-mail atm, the issue is what I wrote above, is there a simple way to get thunderbird to fetch them from the moment I turn the pc on and give me notifications about it?
  
  is there a simple way to get thunderbird to fetch them from the moment I turn the pc on and give me notifications about it?
  Sure. You can autostart Thunderbird and keep it open but I haven't found a way, where Thunderbird closes/starts to the tray and for some odd reasons the developers seem to think that users do not need this functionality which makes the whole email client unusable for a large part of the potential user base.
  I can get the clients to fetch the e-mail atm, the issue is what I wrote above,
  ??? You wrote:
  Who the heck knows how to get evolution/geary to play nice with business gmail/protonmail.
  
  Birdtray might be what you’re looking for. I’ve only used it on windows, but for me it gets thunderbird out of the way but able to be checked and used immediately.
  https://github.com/gyunaev/birdtray

Suddenly i feel nostalgic for xbiff. No longer useful but he was a good dog.

I use Geary and it works well. Just go into settings and allow it to check for notifications when app is closed. It'll run and the background and I'll get the notification then just open up thunderbird to actually check it

I've been using Mailspring for both personal and business email, it seems like a decent UI so far, and it functions as you'd expect: runs at login, sits in the tray, notifies when new email comes in, etc. It's open source and free, unless you need their "pro" features.
Possibly some people will be annoyed that it's an Electron app, but it launches and runs more responsively than Thunderbird ever has on my machines, so I don't find that to be a problem. I would rather a Gnome native app, but I'm not aware of any that function well, as OP laments.
- Awesome. I'll give mailsprint a try, thanks!
- I tried Mailspring but it doesn't support folders very well, and I tried improving that myself but my dev environment never really worked properly so I gave up.
  It works well if you don't heavily use folders (e.g. via Sieve filters).

If you receive these notifications on mobile, you can use kdeconnect (gsconnect on GNOME) which sends pop up notifications on your desktop from your phone, as a workaround.
- I love the idea of kdeconnect but it wreaks havoc on my battery, on both phone and laptop.

A dumb idea that probably doesn't have an implementation: Set Thunderbird to play a sound on mail arrival, but have the sound file actually be a pipe that when read from also pushes a system notification. This is kind of like how randomised .signature files were often set up in the old days.
Other alternatives: 1: There might be a purely mail checker out there that can log into mail servers to see if there's new mail there but not be able to read or download it.
2: Run your own mail server that pulls mail from other servers. Then it's "merely" a matter of checking for file update times on your own machine. Ancient tools like xbiff were designed for this.

I ran into this issue and I chose to fix it in the possibly dumbest way - I just Auto-Open on login, minimize and it just sits there.
Please only do this if you have major issues managing priorities (gotta get that color matched someday!! aka now)

I'm using Claws Mail. It has a plugin that can do notifications in many ways, including a tray icon. You can configure it to start hidden in the tray, configure how often it checks email and on which accounts, to which folders the notification should react etc.

Mailnag?

30 comments