Evolution Mail Notification has no sound

thank you for your bug report, the issue is an upstream one and should be sent to bugzilla.gnome.org

Same here,
I noticed that by changing in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex System/Preferences/Sound the other sounds play fine while using Ubuntu sound profile.

When changing the mail alert sound file (wav) and thus changing the sound profile to Custom the other sounds were also gone.

Changing back to Ubuntu sound profile restored the other sounds, but still no email alert.

In Evolution the check boxes for email alert is checked and there also I pointed to the .wav file

I am not sure if this is an Intrepid issue or Evolution.

same issues here. Every sound on the system works fine for me except incoming email, even when set to default.

shame this is set to low importance as some people in a commercial environment need to respond to emails rapidly

I've found a workaround for this one. First off, the sounds setting in System->Preferences->Sound for New Email Notification does nothing. I don't know why. However, if you go into Evolution and go to Edit->Plugins and find the Mail Notification Plugin, you can change its configuration. From there, select a .wav file and it should work - it did for me on Intrepid Ibex.

-Eli Ribble

this work round does not work for me on intrepid ibex

neither the sound theme or plugin play a wav when a mail arrives

although selecting "beep" in the plugin works with the > test button this also does not work
when receiving a new mail

The plugin was previously working.

It worked for me. I mapped the sound to a location in /usr/share/sounds, and
made sure it was a .wav file, and for the first time this is issuing sounds
for incoming mail!

could have sworn i tried that before...

thanks

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Ender <email address hidden> wrote:

> I've found a workaround for this one. First off, the sounds setting in
> System->Preferences->Sound for New Email Notification does nothing. I
> don't know why. However, if you go into Evolution and go to
> Edit->Plugins and find the Mail Notification Plugin, you can change its
> configuration. From there, select a .wav file and it should work - it
> did for me on Intrepid Ibex.
>
> -Eli Ribble
>
> --
> Evolution Mail Notification has no sound
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/292585
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

Same here.
I've tried to map the wav file to /usr/share/sounds but no luck.

Its just started working for me with jaunty

at first it wasn't but now it does...

I have the first options on the plugin deselected so only play sound when new message "arrive" is selected

I have about zero confidence it will keep working! sadly...

there is a similar issue on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513762

Try to use cGMAIL (cgmail.tuxfamily.org) instead of Evolution plugin
I use this command to play my notification sound:
aplay /home/pektsekye/Documents/mailcall.wav

I also got it to work by changing the sound in the plugin configuration. I do not have a gconf key entry:

gconftool-2 -g /apps/evolution/mail/notify/sound
No value set for `/apps/evolution/mail/notify/sound'

1) I have just updated to Ubuntu 9.04 and Evolution 2.26.1.
2) I now find that I also can't get the mail notification sound to work.
3) I have set Edit/Preferences/General to Play a sound, When New Mail Arrives In.
4) I have set Edit/Plugins/Mail Notification/Configuration/Mail Notification to Play sound file, clicked on Specify filename and selected usr/lib/openoffice/basic-link/share/gallery/sounds/apert.wav.
When I click on Play the sound plays OK but it doesn't play when I receive new mail.

5) When I type gconftool-2 -g apps/evolution/mail/notify/sound it returns;
/usr/lib/openoffice/share/gallery/sounds/apert.wav, which was where the sound file used to be located, but this path no longer exists.

I wonder if it is possible to use gconftool-2 to set the new path to the sound file that I want to use?

I have found the explanation to my problem. The notification sound doesn't work for emails sent from: and to: my Default email address, which is what I was doing to check for sound. It works fine for emails from any other address.

Hi guys,

after I couldn't make this work, here's my dirty workaround for the problem:

* Somewhere in your home directory (for me it's ~/Programs/) create a new file, for example:

touch play_email_sound

* Edit the file with your favourite editor and put this in (replace the path of course):

#! /bin/bash
aplay /full/path/to/soundfile.wav

* Make the script executable:

chmod a+x play_email_sound

* Go to Evolution, create a new incoming mail rule, for example "Sound"

- The criteria should be something like "fits all" (don't know what the English version will say), unless you want it to play sounds only for specific accounts or senders

- The action for the rule should be "Run program" and pick your newly created script from the list (there's also a "Play sound" action, but since the Evolution one doesn't play, this one didn't work for me either)

- Save the rule and put it on the very top of the rule list

* Send a message to yourself and grab a beer until it comes in

Cheers,

Wojtek

Thanks Wojtek, this works!

Wojtek- your solution is the only one that has worked for me, many thanks.

I hope that this bug can be fixed, it's a doozy!

Charlie

This appears to be fixed in Lucid A2

Using Lucid 10.04. No notification sounds.

Added this .wav file to /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/message.wav and changed this key value
/apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification/sound-file in gconf-editor
It now works. Seems it does not like .ogg files.

Should be a simple fix the devs can do easily. Just convert the default sound file to .wav

I also had this problem, so I decided to use a script to play a wav file using aplay. During my testing I found that aplay wouldn't play some of my wav files with the following error:

aplay: test_wavefile:807: can't play WAVE-file format 0x0055 which is not PCM or FLOAT encoded

Once I found one that aplay liked, I tried it in evolution and it worked there too. I'm using evolution 2.28.3 on Ubuntu 10.04. Hope this helps someone.

Further to my last comment, this stopped working shortly after I posted that comment. I have since upgraded to 10.10 and notification still doesn't work. There was also a time when the notification sound would play for every dialogue box that evolution presented.

I did some more digging on this, and looking at the code for evolution 2.30.3, it uses libcanberra for playing the sounds. This is confirmed by looking at the GNOME bug report that says that libcanberra was used since 2.29.x. However, ldd shows that libcanberra is not a dependency of the evolution binary in Ubuntu 10.10. Could it have been built without libcanberra support and hence there is no sound?

Did even more digging, and the plugin shared object for mail notification does depend on libcanberra so I suspect that my previous comment was incorrect. Also, I just changed the sound in the mail notification dialog box and it has started working again, so it might have been fixed with the upgrade to libcanberra.

I can't believe I'm encountering this in 10.10. Anyway, post #5 is a clean, easy work around.

There are a load of wav files in /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/share/gallery/sounds/ You can also use:
$ locate *.wav

to identify some on your hard disk.

Way to fix bugs - just let the report expire!

this has been and still is in the last 3-4 versions of ubuntu - I'm using a plugin as a work-a-round I have come to the concussion that this is actually a gnome theme problem

Given that there is no serious "official" interest - I've become very de-incentivised and stopped investigating the source of this problem - indeed the lacklustre response to this and other bugs has made me realise that reporting any bug appears to be a waste of time.

I thought that this would have been fixed as it is something that new users are likely to encounter and give them a low opinion of the software. On the few occasions that I got a sound to play correctly, it then started playing every time a dialog box was presented by Evolution, at which point I gave up and turned it off. Coupled with the calendar view not showing all appointments correctly when scrolling and the lost ability to save inline images in e-mails makes me think that Evolution is not being supported as well as it could be, which is a shame, because it's a nice piece of software. Bugs like these put me off using Ubuntu and I've been using Linux for a long time.

Have the same issue but have just converted my wav to an ogg and it works OK (although I think that I have tried an ogg earlier. Unfortunately after reading through the posts I also installed the gstreamer plug in for canberra so not sure if that was also involved in the fix.

For new users of Ubuntu I think that using an ogg might be a bit confusing

For me installing libcanberra-gstreamer solved this issue.

Evolution 2.32.2-0ubuntu7 (Using mail-notification plugin)
File /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/message.ogg

Thanks dveeden. You're suggestion worked for me.

For me, the following worked:

In Evolution, go to: Edit > Plugins and choose the plugin called something like "Notification of new mail" (my version is in another language), and open the tab "Configuration" on the right. The FIRST line, I UNmarked (called something like "Play only sound when mails arrive in the INBOX".
The next fielt I marked "Play sound everytime mails arrives".

Below that, You can choose "Beep" (standard), and that don't work, so I choose "Play from file" and found a file that I like, and everything now works fine.

BTW: Happy NewYear 2012 :-)

bug from 2008. Version not more supported.
change status to invalid. (see gnome-bugs)