Gmail push new mail notifications to Linux?

9

2

Is there any way to coax Gmail into pushing new-mail notifications into my Linux machine, without using a full-on graphical mail client like Thunderbird?

edit: Thanks for all the responses, but (unless I'm mistaken) these applications all poll, none of them receive notifications pushed from GMail.

Also, I'd prefer a console-based program, as this will be running on a headless server.

David Wolever

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 1 999

4AFAIK Gmail doesn't push notifications at all, which means all notifiers must poll... but I may be unaware of some enterprise edition feature or other. – Yuval – 15 years ago

1Instant notifications is possible using Gmail's free service (Thundebird is capable). I believe the enabling feature is IMAP IDLE. – alfplayer – 15 years ago

Yuval: yea, alfplayer is right. Gmail does push notifications, both to IMAP and when you're in the web interface. – David Wolever – 15 years ago

Answers

4

There is a program called checkgmail

(http://checkgmail.sourceforge.net/)

that will sit in your gnome taskbar. I know there is a plasma widget for KDE

(http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/gmail-plasmoid?content=101229)

that does something similar, although from what I've read, it might be a little broken.

The program Docky2 has a pretty good gmail notifier built in if you use a compositing window manager like compiz or metacity.

(https://launchpad.net/docky)

I don't know of any terminal based checkers if you don't have an X11 at all.

Katerberg

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 745

The command line equivalent is 'biff' – DaveParillo – 15 years ago

If you're using Ubuntu or another debian-based distro, checkgmail should be in your repository. – DaveParillo – 15 years ago

Do all of this clients support push (instant) notifications? I've only found Thunderbird to have this capability. – alfplayer – 15 years ago

As alfpayer said, all of these (including, as far as I can tell, checkgmail) are polling not push based. – David Wolever – 15 years ago

Ah, good point. Sorry, I didn't catch that. – Katerberg – 15 years ago

2

Mail Notification supports Gmail. It can check multiple accounts simultaneously so you can also use it to notify you of new mail in Evolution, Thunderbird or IMAP and POP accounts.

jwaddell

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 2 626

Ah, thanks – this one does support push notifications… But, alas (and this is my fault, I'm sorry) I didn't make it clear that I wanted an X11-free app. – David Wolever – 15 years ago

1

I know this question is quite old but it came up in my search and I thought I'd update. Evolution now supports IMAP+ or IMAPx which enables IMAP IDLE, and so gmail can push mail to it.

http://chenthill.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/evolution-with-improved-imap-support-imapx/

olan

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 136

1

NickG

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 143

That does look nice, but unfortunately it uses polling, not server-push, too. – David Wolever – 15 years ago

0

Gmail doesn't push. You can receive an atom feed:
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/faq.html#GmailAtomFeed

DanJ

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 491

0

If you are on Ubuntu, try GmailWatcher;

ppa:loneowais/ppa

Owais Lone

Posted 15 years ago

Reputation: 303

What is ppa:loneowais/ppa? – David Wolever – 14 years ago

On Ubuntu you can add this to your list of software sources and you'll get automatic updates for all the apps present in this repository. – Owais Lone – 14 years ago