Mail Notification Plugin Doesn't Notify

After digging around a bit I've found that I can't get mail-notification to display a notification icon at all. The notification I was seeing earlier was being displayed by the evolution-indicator plugin.

I can hear a sound when I recieve a new message, so the mail notification plugin is running, but it either does not display a notification message or it tries to and fails.

I figured out the problem. In mail-notification the mail-notification applet only sends notifications if ubuntu is running a "stracciatella gnome" session. Stracciatella-gnome-session was a "vanilla" gnome session with very little ubuntu. Presumably mail-notification turns itself off for the regular ubuntu gnome session because of the evolution indicator.

However! Now that ubuntu has moved to unity, the gnome-shell session doesn't have the evolution-indicator conflict anymore and mail-notification should be enabled.

The way to fix this would be to remove the is_stracciatella portions of the mail-notification plugin.

After thinking about this for a while, I don't think it will be as simple as just removing the is_stracciatella check. That check should definitely be removed, its crazy for users to have to install some mystery package so that there evolution plugins will work. (Especially now that there is a real need for mail-notification for gnome-shell ubuntu users since evolution-indicator isn't a viable replacement.) However mail-notification needs to be disabled by default for unity users and enabled by default for gnome-shell users (and vice versa for evolution-indicator).

It is now almost two months since this bug was confirmed. Has there been any progress?

I just upgraded to 12.04 and this is *still* a problem. Its even worse because now there isn't a gnome-stracciatella-session package to install anymore. Gaa!

As a potential fix, could the check in mail-noficiation.c be changed from

 if (g_strcmp0(g_getenv("GDMSESSION"), "gnome-stracciatella") == 0) {

to

 if (g_strcmp0(g_getenv("GDMSESSION"), "gnome-shell") == 0) {

As a workaround: For Ubuntu 11.10, I used the stracciatella PPA ( https://launchpad.net/~janvitus/+archive/gnomestracciatella ). It has already been updated for precise, and includes the evolution packages.

Is it possible now to get mail notification with evolution 3.4 (& above)without running evolution? I think evolution 3.4 supports d-bus service for mail.