Thunderbird Indicator Adds Folders Support

Thunderbird Indicator is an add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which notifies you of new mail messages via Ubuntu's standard notification system and the Messaging menu. Once a new mail is received, the Messaging menu's icon turns green and a notification pops up. The Indicator Applet also provides quick access to your contacts and allows you to compose a new message.

A while ago we were telling you about a PPA that provides a package called "xul-ext-indicator" that integrates Thunderbird in the Ubuntu Messaging Menu. This is actually a Thunderbird extension packaged in a .deb so you can easily get updates.

Until now, "xul-ext-indicator" (Thunderbird Indicator extension) displayed a notification (using the Messaging Menu and NotifyOSD) for emails that arrived in your inbox so if you used filters for your emails, the extension failed to work. But a recent update fixes this so Thunderbird Indicator can now display notifications for emails received in any folder. If you want the old behavior (to only display notifications for emails arriving in your inbox), there is an option in the Thunderbird Indicator preferences:

To install Thunderbird Indicator in Ubuntu (the "fixed" version is only available for Ubuntu 11.04 for now), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ruben-verweij/thunderbird-indicator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xul-ext-indicator libnotify-bin

The latest version is only avilable for Ubuntu 11.04. In Ubuntu 10.10, you can try to install the 11.04 package or download this .deb I've created for Ubuntu 10.10 last week (this is the one I'm using - ignore the version number, it's actually 1.4).

Thanks to Radu for the screenshot!

Recent Notifications Applet Can Now Blacklist Applications

Recent Notifications is a GNOME applet that collects recent messages sent with libnotifiy to a notification daemon, such as notify-osd.

Just one day after we wrote about the Recent Notifications applet, it got a cool new feature but we never got to write about it because of the many news that came up this week.

The feature I'm talking about is an option to blacklist applications within the applet. For example if you get a lot of notifications in Pidgin, simply right click a Pidgin notification in Recent Notifications and select "Blacklist Pidgin" - the same goes for any application. If you want to remove an application from the blacklist, right click the Recent Notifications applet and uncheck the app you want to remove from the "Blacklist" tab:

But that's not all; the applet got no less then 8 updates since our post last week. Most of them were bug fixes, but there are also a few other minor features that were introduced, like debug messages or set the message limit.

If you didn't try Recent Notifications applet already, you really should! Add the Recent Notifications PPA and install the applet in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jconti/recent-notifications
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recent-notifications