How to receive email notifications from Thunderbird without keeping the window open?

Support Software & Applications
1

I have installed Thunderbird and would like to get notifications without having to keep the app open like Mail does in Windows 10. I have set my server setting to update every 5 minutes but I never get any notifications. It’s only when I manually open the application that the inbox refreshes.

What setting should I change?

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2

Hi @lordlance,

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve used Thunderbird, but I think it is a setting in the line of “Minimize to system tray.”

Hope this helps!

3

Have a look here:

And here:

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4

I don’t believe that Thunderbird has a native minimize to tray on Linux. You could just keep the program minimized in your task bar, however if you really want it to be closed, there is a third party application called BirdTray that is supposed to enable this feature. You can find it in the Manjaro software center as a flatpak.

5

I don’t need thunderbird. Any mail client will work. I just need push notifications and the client not needing to be kept open. A La mail Windows 10. I installed kmail but it requird me to manually set up incoming and outgoing email which I found a bit much.

6

What about going to Thunderbird parameters and setting the “incoming mail notification” ?

TB_Param
TB_Param1014×370 41.5 KB

7

Go into the “Add/Remove Software” app, click the hamburger menu in the top right, select “Software Mode,” and then search for “mail”. You’ll find quite a few mail clients, take your pick.

8

Do you really need Thunderbird itself to notify you?
I use the mailwatch plugin in XFCE to notify me about new incoming emails.

9

Don’t really care how I get notified. Just need to be notified and clicking on it should open the mail like I would in Windows 10 with Mail.

10

Then perhaps some mailwatch app/widget is what you are looking for.
Depends on the Desktop you are using.
This is the one I’m using for XFCE: panel-plugins:xfce4-mailwatch-plugin:start [Xfce Docs]
Essentially it is a tray icon that changes and tells you how many emails are pending and in which mailbox in case you have several.
There should exist similar ones for KDE, Gnome, etc

11

I am using KDE.

12

KDE is hugely extensible with various widges, extensions, …
Perhaps start here https://store.kde.org/
Sorry that I can’t be more specific. Havn’t used KDE for ages…

13

Perhaps this helps:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or even:

All found at https://store.kde.org/browse

As @gefri mentioned.

And after a quick google I came across:

So there are many options then, just look around.

Edit:

That last one is even in the AUR:

$ pamac search birdtray
[...]
birdtray                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      1.9.0-1   AUR
Run Thunderbird with a system tray icon.

So can be quite easily installed with:

pamac build birdtray
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14

I got KMail running and it runs as system tray service. My next question is though I want the notification to be clickable so that I can directly open the email which is not the case currently.

15

I suspect you’re better off asking KMail support (forums?) that.

16

Very well. Thank you.

1 Like
17

Just came across this:

It states:

So for KMail at least while there is no support for making the whole notification clickable (bug 412579), there is support for having some action buttons on the notification (which should have an option to show the email), in the KMail settings there should be a plugin called “New Email Notifier” or something like that, if you open the settings for that plugin there should be an option for to enable those buttons.

18

Firefox has a nice extension that I use for that.