Eigenco.de

This Thunderbird extension provides a new mail notification system for the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client.

The extension is designed to serve to following purposes:

• Add blacklisting for folders.
• Provide a new notification logic to ensure no incoming mail is unnoticed (in case of lots of incoming mail).
• Provide better configurability for shown message fields, number of shown messages, etc.

Please note that this is still in beta state. I'm using this since half a year for personal use.

Nevertheless i would be glad to here from you if you actually tested it on your platform. If you have a question to one of the following points you can drop me a mail at mailalert at eigenco de.

• Download
• Installation
• Usage & Screenshots
• Localization
• Troubleshooting
• Problems of the standard implementation

Download

• Version 0.2.0: mailalert-0.2.0.xpi (Thunderbird 3.1 - 3.1.* / WINNT_x86-msvc)
• Version 0.3.0: mailalert-0.3.0.xpi (Thunderbird 9.0 - 9.* / WINNT_x86-msvc, Tested on Windows 7 and Vista SP2)
  

Installation

• Download a XPI file from above.
• Install in Thunderbird under "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions > Install..." and restart Thunderbird.
• Disable standard notifications under "Tools > Options > General > When new messages arrive". (This is planned to being changed at extension startup. However at the moment it has to be done manually.)
• For the Thunderbird 9 version the preference mail.biff.show_tray_icon must also be disabled. This can be performed in the "Tools > Options > Advanced > View Configuration" dialog by setting the preference to false.

Usage & Screenshots

Notification window

The logic behind the notification window and message acknowledging is fairly easy:

The notification window is shown every time a new mail arrives in a folder that is not blacklisted. Each new mail is kept in the notification window until it gets acknowledged (or Thunderbird is restarted).

There are three buttons in the top right area of the window (from left to right):

• Show preferences.
• Close window and acknowledge new mail.
• Close window without acknowledging.

Acknowledging new mails removes the indicator from the system tray and clears the list of mails shown in the notification window. It also marks all new mails as not new but unread (as in new vs. unread)

Settings

You can find the settings on the top right of each notification window and in the main menu under "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions > MailAlert > Settings"

Localization

I tried my best to offer a english localization (en_US) for the settings dialog There might be strings out there that are not localized at the moment. Up to version 0.3.0 only the locales en_US and de_DE are supported.

Troubleshooting

The extension includes a binary XPCOM component (NotificationIconService.dll) to integrate to notification icon into the windows system tray. Thus the extension only works on windows systems. It was compiled using Visual Studio C++ 2010 Express on a Windows 7 and will be replaced by a solution using jsctypes in some future version.

Problems of the standard implementation

Below is a list of problems with the default implementation that made me build this extension. Feel free to contact me if you think any of those points is not valid.

No blacklist for folders

The standard notification system does not provide a blacklist for mail folders. Thus many mails from low priority folders are shown what makes it harder to actually spot important mails.

No configurable number of new messages

It is not possible to configure how much new messages should be shown. At most five messages are shown at each time. Thus if you received more than five mails since last watching mails, you won't see all of them in the notification window.

No proper sorting of new messages

Messages in the standard notification window are not shown in cronological order. If i understood the implementation correct, it just shows mails from one single folder that has new mail (more or less randomly).