LGMTray is a lightweight application that docks in your system tray, and notifies you when new mail has arrived on your GMail account.
It is written in C++, is designed to have very few dependencies, and can therefore be easily built on many systems. Currently, only an X11 implementation is available (which uses the FreeDesktop.org System Tray Protocol), and the features are very limited.
Copy the sample configuration file lgmtray.sample_config, rename
it to ~/.lgmtray, and edit it to reflect your username/password and
preferences. Then, simply run the application by calling lgmtray.
First, make sure you have the necessary libraries installed. LGMTray currently needs the following libraries:
To build the project, run
make
If you have a special system setup, you should edit Makefile.config
to reflect this in the build parameters.
On one of my machines, Curl crashes very regularly with a SIGPIPE when opening a connection. I have reported this to the Curl developers, but no cause has been found so far. As a workaround, LGMTray currently ignores SIGPIPE signals, and continues as normal. This should have no visual impact, except log messages saying that there was a problem, and that the application continues anyway.
- Allow the background of the tray to be transparent, taking the system tray's background color.
- Make the check interval dynamic, where mail is checked more frequently after new mail has arrived, less frequently when there is no mouse movement, ...
- Open GMail when the icon is clicked
- Add a tooltip and a context menu
- Official GMail notifier: Works only on Windows and Mac OS X.
- GMail Notifier: Written in Python, but has dependencies on several add-on Python modules (e.g. Gtk).