I get visual notifications of new mail despite requesting no notifications

Thank you for reporting this bug and helping make Ubuntu better.

Do you have mail-notification* installed? These are not evolution packages (or plugins), and mail-notification-evolution will generate the pop-ups as you describe. There is a good chance it is mail-notification-evolution that is causing your pain. On my system, the Evolution notification plugin is disabled, and I do not get any such pop-ups (and I do not have mail-notification* installed).

Notification-daemon is a generic notification daemon -- it is driven by other programs (that request a notification to be presented to the user). I am almost sure n-d is not the culprit here.

Yes I agree this is most likely not a bug in n-d, it just notifies what it's told (I the time of filing the bug, I had no idea what n-d was).

I don't have m-n-e

fergal@lap ~> dpkg -l mail-notification-evolution
No packages found matching mail-notification-evolution.

but even if I did, it shouldn't cause this - on a multi-user system, the presence of absence of packages should not override user prefs.

My guess is that when dbus notifications were added to evo, nobody thought to filter them based on the "notification" prefs.

this may be the case. Strange that I do not have this issue though... but this is a personal laptop I use, so no other users.

Did you ever enable mail notification? What do you have for the gconf /apps/evolution/mail/notification entries?

fergal@lap ~> gconftool-2 -R /apps/evolution/mail/notification
 notification = true
 blink-status-icon = true

but I have no idea how that got there, my prefs widget is definitely set to no notification. In fact, twiddling my settings has no impact on the output of that command. Is it possible to adjust those values through the GUI at all?

I have a full backup of my system before the upgrade and I can see that

~/.gconf/apps/evolution/mail/

does not have a notification directory. So my guess is that it was created by the new version of evolution when first run and these are the default settings.

How about your gconf?

For the benefit of anyone else suffering from this

gconftool-2 -s /apps/evolution/mail/notification/notification -t bool false
gconftool-2 -s /apps/evolution/mail/notification/blink-status-icon -t bool false

does the trick, but that doesn't address the root cause.

My gconf had both of the keys set to true when I checked them -- but I did not get new mail notification until I enabled the plugin.

I then disabled the plugin, and bounced Evo. The gconf keys were still set, and the plugin still disabled -- but I did not get any new mail notification anymore.

So, we still experience different behaviour between ourselves. What version of evo and Ubuntu are you running?

I am also rejecting the notification-daemon "affects", since this really does not seem to be related to n-d.

I'm on 7.10 (evo 2.12). My previous install was whatever came before that and it didn't have those keys at all.

I think I see the problem. I also have the notification plugin enabled (I hadn't ever seen the plugin prefs before). So the problem here is really that there is no interaction between the plugin and the notification prefs.

Ideally the plugin would add another option to the notification section, otherwise there's no way for a user to know why their prefs are seemingly being ignored. It's certainly not good to have multiple locations for notification prefs.

I will have a look as soon as possible on the plugin source, and see if there is need for an upstream bug. Of course, anyone else with time availble can do the same. Upstream researach can also help.

Right now I see this bug as having two options: goes to INVALID because it ends up as not-a-bug (the plugin was active), or indeed the code tries, and fails, to set the gconf entries above. I am keeping it open on the chance the code is wrong.

Just for fun, I had the same thing - except it was persistent until clicked.
Checking, I found:

$ gconftool-2 -R /apps/evolution/mail/notification
 notification = true
 blink-status-icon = true

So I did:

$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/evolution/mail/notification/notification -t bool false
$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/evolution/mail/notification/blink-status-icon -t bool false

So now it reads:

$ gconftool-2 -R /apps/evolution/mail/notification
 notification = false
 blink-status-icon = false

I am getting e-mail notification, but it doesn't flash...
Running Ubuntu 7.10 + Evo 2.12.0

Removing the notification thing from the panel results in a popup with the message "you have received x mail" appearing under the main menu.

Simon, you can also go to Edit->Plugins and disable the notification plugin in there (apologies if you knew this already, it's not clear from your post).

An observation: per the code, if the gconf keys do not exist (which would be the case on installing Evo, or when enabling the plugin for the first time) they will be created when the first new email hits the inbox (and *only* for the inbox), and set to TRUE.

That makes a some kind of sense - if your plugin has no prefs GUI then unless you default it to being on, nobody will ever use it.

Thank you, thank you for the two workarounds (gconftool magic and plugins), Fergal! I had no idea where the new feature was coming from and had no way to stop Evolution from shattering my focus randomly - I've been having to drop it offline while trying to work, and that makes a quick glance for new email take considerably longer. My brain's sensitive enough to movement that I can't leave browser windows on most newspaper sites left open on the desktop I'm working in (without adblock, that is); they actively bother me.

For the "updates to your Ubuntu available" -popup bubble there was a straightforward fix to poke at the icon and tell it to not pop up, and now we get along splendidly. The email icon, on the other hand, has no interface beyond "click to make this go away until the next mail arrives"; it blinks, pops up a bubble and *keeps blinking* if I try to ignore it. It's been royally stressful (I get kind of much mail, and prefer to choose for myself when to go into interrupt-handling mode).

I'd strongly recommend disabling the plugin by default until it both respects the user's notification settings and can be turned off from the notification tray directly. Given the existing ways of notifying for new mail, it's not important enough to warrant the disturbance to users who use Evolution for heavy-duty mail handling. For others, it should be a nice and useful tool once the preferences are ironed out a bit. (E.g. blink/no blink, blink x times then stop, blink x times then go away, popup/no popup would probably be nice modes to choose from.)

@all: Evo 2.21.14/E-D-S 2.21.14, released today, seem to address the configuration of the mail-notification plugin. Can you verify this is indeed resolved? I will then close the bug. Thanks.

Is there a .deb somewhere?

Hi Fergal, sorry for the delay.

yes, for Hardy. You will have to set your apt sources.list to use the hardy repositories. You can also use 'prevu' to backport it to your version of Ubuntu, but it may have some issues on dependencies (and you will have to 'prevu' each one of them).

marking as Fix released. Still to be seen if there is interest in backporting.