notification for new mail in ubuntu 18.04 with thunderbird and pop3 accounts

Question

Is there a (recommended) way to activate notifications for new mails with Ubuntu 18.04 and Thunderbird (POP3 not IMAP)?

I've found some guides in the net, but they are all for older versions of Ubuntu or marked as deprecated or experimental. And the gnome online account app does not support POP3 (only IMAP).

Thanks in advance :-)

Solution

I recommend to try MailNag.

An extensible mail notification daemon

Mailnag is a daemon program that checks POP3 and IMAP servers for new mail.
On mail arrival it performs various actions provided by plugins.
Mailnag comes with a set of desktop-independent default plugins for visual/sound notifications, script execution etc. and can be extended with additional plugins easily.

You can install it from official PPA with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pulb/mailnag
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mailnag 

If you need intergration with desktop then

• for GNOME Shell install gnome-shell-mailnag

  sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-mailnag
  

• if you use GNOME Online Accounts in GNOME Shell then install mailnag-goa-plugin

  sudo apt-get install mailnag-goa-plugin
  

• for modern Unity, MATE, Xfce, Pantheon Elementary install mailnag-messagingmenu-plugin

  sudo apt-get install mailnag-messagingmenu-plugin
  

• for Cinnamon use instruction from mailnagapplet.

Note: Some packages are currently not available for 18.04 LTS, but I have contacted the developer to fix this problem.

Comments

[N0rbert]

Good question. Previously I have used Popper (now obsolete, but I have forced it to work on 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS). You can try MailNag. Or may be some new GNOME Shell Extension...

[N0rbert]

FYI I have tested Popper on 18.04 LTS running MATE and Unity - it works. If this is what you want - then you can follow my guide.

[sjuk]

Thanks @N0rbert. I've tried mailnag plus mailnag-gnome-shell. This is a decent solution for now.