GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 588843
[mail-notification] Emit additional message information upon receiving new mail
Last modified: 2009-10-30 16:04:20 UTC
Could we have additional information other than a folder.changed event emitted when new mail arrives? I do other things than sit at my desk all day (or, at least I'd like to) but I also want notification of events such as new e-mails. So, I use Speech Dispatcher to announce a playing track's artist and title for Rhythmbox (gitorious.org/djaqua) and to announce the sender of Pidgin instant messages (and, sometimes, read its content) (gitorious.org/imaqua). I'd like to write a dbus client or an eplugin to read aloud a newly received e-mail's sender and subject. That way, I can decide whether the potential interruption warrants my further attention (and returning to the computer). Bug 464400 requests sender, subject information be included in mail notification messages. However, there are concerns as to how to do such a thing effectively in a UI. Providing these events for others to consume would delegate bad decision making to those who want to make those bad decisions. In my usage, I rarely get many new messages at a check, only one or two when any, but my general plan for a speech-based notification plugin/dbus-client would be to, given enough messages, just announce the number of them.
I did this within commit daa8339 in evo master (2.29.2+) for bug #464400. There are new text parameters for a dbus message: msg_uid, msg_sender and msg_subject. it works only when just one message is received. The format of a parameter is "name:value", where 'name' is for example "msg_uid".