No Evolution support

I'm having the same problem: running Dapper (originally flight 4, but current to Apr 5). The preferences dropdown within mail-notification doesn't include an option for Evolution, even though the documentation and project website say it should.

One possible reason:
The project website (http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/) includes a patch ("patch providing Evolution 2.4.x support") which is mostly changing evolution-2.2 to evolution 2.4 in various places. Now I have evolution 2.6, so it could be that a similar patch would solve the problem. I haven't tested this.

I would like to see the evolution support as well.

Confirming this.

Assigning to MOTUs.

This is the result of patching the official mail-notification patch, originally provided for Evolution 2.4 support at http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify.

This modified version of the patch should provide Evolution 2.6 support.

Any chance anyone could review the patch?

Thanks.

Sorry, I forgot to add that the patched mail-notification package seems to work well on my Dapper system.

I can monitor my Evolution 2.6 Inbox with no trouble.

However, there is something else to have into account, and that is that a bug in libbonobo, which mail-notification uses, can lead to crashing bonobo applications in the following scenario:

when mail-notification is running but evolution is not, mail-notification tries to contact evolution every second. Quoting the mail-notification developer:
<quote>
Because of the bonobo-activation bug, each contact
attempt causes the bonobo-activation-server process to leak out one
file descriptor. Eventually bonobo-activation-server exhausts all the
available file descriptors and bad things start to happen.
</quote>

So that basically means that until the libbonobo bug is fixed, it is not good to have mail-notification running when evolution is not running. However, when both are running, there is no trouble at all.

This has been already reported here:

https://launchpad.net/bugs/44078

debdiff for Evolution 2.6 support

Bernat:
I compiled libbonobo with the mentioned patch and compiled mail-notification with the previously attached debdiff.
But if evolution isn't started, the mail-notification properties menu can't be opened a second time. I'll attach the error message.
Also, all the applets crash at login when I configure mail-notification to watch evolution inbox.
It also seems that bonobo-activation-server gets killed somehow by mail-notification.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Whoopie

mail-notification error

After having patched libbonobo2-0 (file descriptor leak) and mail-notification (Evolution 2.6 support) I observed the following behaviour on my system:

1) The libbonobo2-0 patch seems to fix the issue whereby if mail-notification is running and Evolution is not, applications that use the bonobo-activation-server crash after a while. After patching libbonobo2-0, mail-notification can be left running without evolution and no application will crash.

2) However, the libbonobo2-0 patch seemed to introduce a new bug: if mail-notification is started automatically with the GNOME session (be it because it was active at the end of the previous session and "automatically save changes to session" is set or because it was explicitly configured to be executed at startup), all GNOME applets on the notification area crash, along with the gnome settings daemon. These are the error messages I get:

2.1)
"There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.

Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly.

The Settings Daemon restarted too many times.

The last error message was:

System exception: IDL: omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0

GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in."

2.2)
"The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:GNOME_ClockApplet".
Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?"

Message 2.2 appears for every applet on the notification area, which cannot be loaded afterwards. Killing mail-notification and making sure it is not loaded at login time seems to solve the issue. Basically, as long as mail-notification is not loaded at login time, it works as expected.

Whoopie: oddly enough, I've never seen the message you are getting, as you see my error messages are different.

I do not know whether this is a libbonobo issue or a mail-notification one. Without having investigated further, I've got a feeling it is a problem with the latter.

I emailed the mail-notification developer with this issue and he replied that he does not think that the errors have anything to do with the bonobo patch. Apparently, he commited it to FreeBSD's GNOME a long time ago and nobody has reported any issues since.

After seeing this behaviour, I reverted the libbonobo patch and now I'm just like I started: mail-notification can be started at login time without trouble, but evolution must be started as well, otherwise you get crashing bonobo apps after a while.

What I do basically is to have always evolution and mail-notification active. I set up GNOME to automatically save the session, so if Evo and mail-notification are still active when logging out, they will be automatically loaded at the next login.

I just have to remember to kill mail-notification if at some point I must stop evolution.

Last minute note: I've just been to the mail-notification homepage and it seems that mail-notification-3.0-rc1 has just been released today! I might try to compile that later on, see if it fixes the issue...

That's really the same behaviour as here. Thanks for your great explanation!!!

Bernat:
mail-notification works fine now.
Didn't start Evolution for nearly 2 days to see if I get these memory leaks. But no!!

So I think, the libbonobo patch isn't needed anymore. What's your impression?

Mail-Notification v2.0 appears to be compiled without Evolution (v2.6.1) support.

~$ mail-notification -l
Compiled-in mailbox backends: mbox, MH, Maildir, POP3, IMAP, Gmail, Sylpheed
Compiled-in POP3 and IMAP features: SASL, IPv6

If I start up Evolution and then manually run mail-notification, it never notifies me of newly arrived mail.

Debian package >= 3.0.dfsg.1-1 provides evolution support.

Fixed in Edgy with mail-notification 3.0.dfsg.1-3ubuntu1.

Is this going to be back-ported to dapper?

On Sun, 2006-07-30 at 08:56 +0000, Whoopie wrote:
> Fixed in Edgy with mail-notification 3.0.dfsg.1-3ubuntu1.
>
> ** Changed in: mail-notification (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Fix Released
>

As glad as I am that this has been fixed in Edgy and that now we've got mail-notification 3.0 with Evolution support, I don't think it makes sense to backport this package until this related bug has been fixed: https://launchpad.net/bugs/44078

In any case, the backport should be requested there first: https://launchpad.net/products/dapper-backports