GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 572700
Empathy doesn't alert to new email messages
Last modified: 2018-05-22 13:22:01 UTC
Empathy should be able to alert when there is a new email or at least have a link to check for email on all the protocols that support this. Other information:
Empathy is not an email client. Evolution can already do email notification... closing as wontfix unless you have real argument to do that.
True. What about people who prefer web mail client? Is there a good option for them?
Hm... Maybe that could be optional and default to not show email notifications then. But that needs a telepathy interface, so it can't be done in empathy yet. Ok, I'll reopen this bug, sorry I were a bit too fast at closing :p
This needs to be done and would be really useful as well. the problem with how evolution/ apps like checkmail does it is that they all use pull notifications. but empathy can do post notifications. pidgin has done this well and is a really useful addition from a user point of view. also useful for people using gmail/yahoo mail etc from the web interface. the cloud integration this brings is big.
This is blocked by <http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13349>.
Any updates to this yet? I am sure the addition of a web mail notifier is would be an extremely popular addition. From forums I've read, it's a big reason why many users don't switch over from Pidgin. This has been discussed recently here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/332355 Cheers
I only use webmail (gmail in this case) This is the sole reason that I can't do the switch from pidgin to empathy! Please fix and you get one more user of empathy! :)
The spec and implementation in Telepathy is going pretty well (the first draft of the spec has been implemented for Google talk and MSN). Once it will be finished, we'll need to have an UI for it and, tbh, I'm not sure Telepathy is the best place for that. I'd rather see a plugin in evolution and/or an applet (or whatever gnome-shell will use to do such things).
*** Bug 610885 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I switched from pidgin to empathy. But I'm always missing email notification feature.
no email no empathy, wanted to use it in Ubuntu 10.04 but back to Pidgin.
The fd.o bug mentioned in comment #6 is fixed, is anything else needed before (if ever) this is considered for Empathy? thanks.
I'm still not sure that's Empathy's job. Maybe that should be done by Evolution or gnome-shell ?
Guillaume, from the developers' point of view it may indeed be something to delegate to the appropriate desktop components as this is not IM related. However, I think the popularity of this request is due to how pidgin (and maybe others) are doing it, and to the users it may feel natural to be alerted and be able to open their inbox from within the chat application. Besides familiarity and no-surprises migration to empathy, a good reason to have this in is that many users may not run evolution at all - the majority of webmail users, exactly the ones who may benefit from YMSG and MSN notifications - or even have gnome shell and other indicator applets installed.
I won't use empathy because of this honestly, yet I still use evolution. My reasoning for having this issue is because I use MSN and hotmail only supports POP, which I heavily dislike; I only use Evolution for IMAP compatible services I use. Due to my dislike in POP, I have no other choice than to use web mail. Plus web mail is familiar and portable (ie from any web browser, computer or operating system). I find it very convenient to use pidgin as it tells me when I have mail. I realize there are applications that have the sole function do this, but they seem very glitchy or hard to get working. On top of that, it just makes sense to a chat client to notify me because it has my login info already, it might as well have the option to do it (default or not), and there's the "all in one package" appeal to it as well. My point is that some people don't want to use evolution (or similar non web mail application), and some can't or won't bother to get another program to notify them of their mail, yet still want the functionality. It's not like it will make empathy worse or anything, if anything, it'll make it better and more useful.
(In reply to comment #13) > I'm still not sure that's Empathy's job. Maybe that should be done by Evolution > or gnome-shell ? Definitely not evolution -- this is mostly useful for people _not_ running a mail client (well mail.google.com webmail use probably covers 99.9% of the cases). I kind of agree that this has little to do with Empathy. The usability problem in most other options is discoverability though. How is this feature enabled/disabled if it's not part of empathy? There are grand plans on unifying account setups (so you could configure your google account in one place for all GNOME apps) and that would be the natural place for this, but until that I think Empathy is the least bad place for at least the UI. We have the notification working in Meego netbook, let me look it up for reference...
Quite unsurprisingly it was actually done by nicolas@collabora :) https://meego.gitorious.org/meego-netbook-ux/meego-panel-myzone/trees/master/mailme
By evolution I meant evolution-data-server, but yeah. We are moving forward to a less Empathy centric experience (see bug #653938) so I really don't think that Empathy is the right place for this. Is there some plan to integrate mail notifications in the Shell? I think that would be the best place actually.
I hadn't looked at GOA and the status of design for shell integration in a few months... Now that I've educated myself I have to agree: things are moving forward fast enough that doing this in empathy seems less useful. I might have a go at making a stand-alone version of a gs-telepathy-email notifier so there would be a clear proposal of what would need integrating into the shell (or whatever would be required for the GOA UI to actually work).
Maybe http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/ should be revived. It still works, but just needs to be patched a little. Arch Linux has quite a few patches already, along with an adaption to GTK3: http://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/mail-notification I agree with Jossi, this is for people who use webmail. I've been using the mailnotify application to be able to switch over to empathy. The only thing that annoys me is that when I click the notification, it opens evolution, not webmail (ie hotmail.com, mail.google.com, etc). Maybe some fork action is in order? I was heavily considering it myself as the application is GPL3.
(In reply to comment #20) > I agree with Jossi, this is for people who use webmail. I've been using the > mailnotify application to be able to switch over to empathy. The only thing > that annoys me is that when I click the notification, it opens evolution, not > webmail (ie hotmail.com, mail.google.com, etc). Details like this are why Gnome Online Accounts -integration would make so much sense. I made (read: copied from meego myzone) a quick proof of concept of the telepathy-based notifier -- which btw does open webmail by default: http://github.com/jku/mailme but this skips the difficult parts: how is the configuration presented to the user? What if someone wants email notifications but does not want to get logged into google chat? etc... As far as I'm concerned this bug can be closed or moved to some more appropriate place -- I'll talk to the GOA devs/designers about this when I have a bit of time.
I really like that, thanks! If this can be included as a gnome application, this bug can definitely be closed in empathy.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/empathy/issues/47.