(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I am using Puppy 1.0.1 and IceWM with Mozilla Thunderbird. How do I set the little mail icon next to the clock to reflect the mail items in thunderbird instead of Sylpheed?

right click on the icon
and edit item

Tried that. That little icon next to the clock does not do anything when I right click on it.

dvw86 wrote:Tried that. That little icon next to the clock does not do anything when I right click on it.

I find that I have to double-left-click it to get it to do anything.

Flash wrote:I find that I have to double-left-click it to get it to do anything.

That just seems to open up Sylpheed. I can not find an option to change it to show Thunderbirds new mail status.

look in /root/.icewm/preferences

this line sets what program runs when the mail icon is clicked:
MailCommand="puppy-email"

puppy-email is a script i wote and put in my-applications/bin
change the script to run whatever program you like

it took me a while to figure out how the get the mail icon to appear on the task bar

i'm no expert on how icewm interfaces with email
i pointed it to the dir Sylpheed uses for mail ... /root/Mail/inbox/ ... Sylpheed puts a file for each email in the inbox there, named 1, 2, 3, and so on ... i wrote a script that periodically checks if there are any files with number names in that dir, and creates or deletes a file in /tmp accordingly, and setup icewm to check for the presence of the file in /tmp ... it worked pretty well, but i didn't include the script in my icewm package

i did some googling, but i never found out exactly how icewm and mail worked ... if anyone knows how it really is supposed to work, it would be great if you posted the infomation

i did figure out how to get icewm to check your email server directly ... so the mail icon should change when you get mail ... you do not need Thunderbird running ... basically, uncomment the line:
#MailBoxPath="pop3://myid:mypassword@pop.myserver.com:110"
in preferences, and configure it to your mail server
icewm may hang for a while when it first starts up if you setup the mail icon this way ... this probably would not work well if you have dialup

GuestToo,
Thanks for that great information. I will give it a try when I get home from work today.

Redirecting "MailCommand" to look at Thunderbird worked great. I just had to place a link to Thunderbird in my-applications/bin. I will try to get IceWM to check my mail automatically as well since I don't use dial up. Thanks again.

Another way to get a new mail notify tray icon to work with Thunderbird is

http://moztraybiff.mozdev.org

Seems to work well for me, and doesn't require any extra fiddling with icewm prefs file. Just turn off mail notification in ~/.icewm/preferences and let moztraybiff do the notifying. Especially helpful if you are checking more than one account -- I couldn't figure out how to do that with the built-in notifier. Of course, you have to leave Tbird running all the time for this to work.