xfce4 mailwatch plugin

Note that this plugin is now maintained by someone else. The offical website for it can be found at the Xfce Goodies site.

About

Features

Requirements

About

Mailwatch is a plugin for the Xfce 4 panel. It is intended to replace the current (4.0, 4.2) mail checker plugin in Xfce 4.4. The Mailwatch plugin is written and maintained by Brian Tarricone and Pasi Orovuo. For now, please direct all questions about the Mailwatch plugin to the Xfce Users’ Mailing List. All bugs should be reported on Xfce Bugzilla, under the Xfce Panel Plugins product.

Features

IMAP and Secure IMAP support
POP3 and Secure POP3 support
Local Mbox mailbox support
Local Maildir mailbox support
Local MH-Maildir mailbox support
GMail support
Fully multithreaded design: no panel lockups
Informative new-message breakdown in tooltip
Ability to run program on new messages or button click
Informative logger to help track down mail connection problems

Requirements

Xfce 4 base libraries, version 4.2.0 or greater
Xfce 4 Panel, version 4.2.0 or greater (the plugin works with both the “old” 4.2 panel, and the 4.4/4.6 panel)
Optional but recommended: GNU TLS, version 1.2.0 or greater, for secure IMAP and POP3 support

Downloads

The current version of Mailwatch is 1.1.0, released on 14 September 2008.

Source: .tar.bz2 (SHA1 sum, PGP signature)

You can retrieve the current development version of the plugin from Xfce’s Git repository. To check out the module, issue the following command:

1$ git clone git://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-mailwatch-plugin

You can keep the plugin up-to-date by periodically issuing git pull from the source directory. You can also view the Mailwatch sources via cgit

Installation

In order to install a released version fo Mailwatch, issue the following commands from the root of the Mailwatch source tree:

1./configure --prefix=${xfce_prefix}
2make
3make install

Where ${xfce_prefix} is the location where Xfce 4 is installed. On most systems this should be /usr. The make install portion should be run as root (or via sudo) if the prefix is a system location.

In order to install the Git version of Mailwatch, issue the following commands instead:

1./autogen.sh --prefix=${xfce_prefix}
2make
3make install

Configuration

“Really Old” Panel (Xfce 4.0): Sorry, you’re out of luck. Mailwatch requires core library functions only present in Xfce 4.2 and later.

“Old” Panel (Xfce 4.2): After installing the plugin, it is necessary to restart the panel for it to discover the new plugin. Run pkill -USR1 xfce4-panel to cause it to restart, or select the Restart option from the panel’s right-click menu. After restarting, add the plugin to the panel by right-clicking on one of the handles, selecting Add new item, and picking Mail Watcher from the list of plugins that appears.

“New” Panel (Xfce 4.4+): After installing the plugin, it should be detected automatically by the panel. Simply right click on the panel, select Add New Item, and either double-click or drag the Mail Watcher item from the list to the panel.

Documentation is provided with the plugin (click the Help button in the configuration dialog), or you can view it online.

Contributions

While the Mailwatch plugin is mostly feature-complete, it may still have bugs. Bug reports and patches can be submitted on Xfce Bugzilla. Development discussion should take place on the Xfce Development Mailing List. The Mailwatch plugin is easily extensible to support extra mailbox types if needed.

If you’d like to see Mailwatch translated into another language, please join the Xfce i18n list and see if anyone’s already working on your language. Post all new and updated translations to that list. You can also check the status of current Mailwatch translations.