My favorite e-mail reader is Thunderbird. Anyway, running Thunderbird all day all night is not funny at all especially when I have many thousand mails for a year. However, I would like to get a sort of notification as soon as possible to let me know about the incoming mails. I want to have light-weight mail notification tool for daily use.

My window manager is based on Gnome so the tool should be Gnome. I found mailnotify and its Ubuntu package mail-notification. It looks very promising. I installed it via apt-get.

sudo apt-get install mail-notification

A new menu item has appeared in System -> Preferences -> Mail Notification. Adding an account is so easy including explicit Gmail support. Everything works great. Just to note its memory footprint. The core process with empty account takes about 34 MB. When I added a POP3 account with SSL support, it takes 45 MB. Then I added an Gmail account, it now takes 55 MB. Comparing to Thunderbird after startup takes about 89 MB. It is worth enought to run Mail Notification all day all night.

Tags: gnome, mail notification, ubuntu