Get CheckGMail to Use Ubuntu Notification System Easily

By , Published November 11, 2009
CheckGMail is a popular panel applet for notifying a user of new mail in their Gmail account.
It’s also popular for annoying Ubuntu users since it doesn’t use the notification system like most other applications do! Until now…
TomHare has found a workaround that enables CheckGMail to notify you of e-mail using the proper notification system and not it’s own blasted pop-ups.

(Note: I couldn’t get CheckGmail to work, so i’m using his screenshots. Thanks Tom!)

How To Do It
  • Install libnotify (sudo apt-get install libnotify)
  • Go to CheckGMail’s preferences 
  • Set the “pop-up time” to 0 seconds
  • Paste the following into the “Command to execute on new mail” field: -
  • if [ %m = 1 ] ; then mess="Message"; else mess="Messages"; fi; notify-send "You Have %m New $mess" -i ~/bin/gmail.png

 Done!

Super big thanks to TomHare for sharing this with OMG! UBUNTU!
His original article can be found @ tomharesblog.blogspot.com
Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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  • http://seifsallam.co.cc/ Seif Sallam

    why do you need this when you have Docky, its buggy and no integration with Do yet but i still love it

  • Anonymous

    “You 1 new message?”

    How about “You HAVE 1 new message” :)

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      I can’t get this to work so i didn’t spot that. It’s purely an oversight on Tom’s part i’m sure, just add the word ‘have’ to the command like so: -

      if [ %m = 1 ] ; then mess=”Message”; else mess=”Messages”; fi; notify-send “You Have %m New $mess” -i ~/bin/gmail.png

  • Anonymous

    I know, just teasin :)

    • Tom Hare

      Oh yeah… oops

  • Anonymous

    How do I get the picture to work? It doesn’t work for me….

  • 5nak3

    I believe the problem if you are running Karmic is that libnotify as far as I could tell does not exist in the repo’s instead I had to install libnotify-bin for this to work.

    When I was running sudo apt-get install libnotify the terminal would respond with such a package does not exist. And with the already installed libnotify packages namely:

    pidgin-libnotify
    python-notify
    libnotify1
    libnotify0.4-cil

    the command above would not work and thus the notification would not show.

    • Anonymous

      To get it to work for me (aside from the Gmail picture) I had to type sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin then finish the rest of the tutorial.

      • 5nak3

        Yeah pretty much what I said…although maybe my English was not clear enough. Sorry about that.

        I’m not sure if this was a karmic only issue of would other versions of ubuntu such as Hardy and Jaunty also require libnotify-bin as opposed to libnotify

    • bhm

      Same thing on Jaunty.

  • daniel

    I prefer mail-notification
    It requires some tweaking in gconf to work with notify-osd, but it works with more webmail providers.

  • http://scribu.net/ scribu

    But I like checkgmail’s notifications! They let me get rid of uniteresting mail without opening the browser.

    • Anonymous

      Same here, you can check, delete, archive, spam anything with their mail popups. I’m not sure if this overwrites those options, maybe it just tells you when mail comes, I have to check it out still. But I love checkgmail compared to the competition

  • http://twitter.com/yuretsz yuretsz

    You should install libnotify-bin to make this work
    sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin

    • guest

      where to find the preferences of CheckGmail?

      • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

        Right-click on the tray icon ;)