Comment 51 for bug 236046

Sorry, I have no experience whatsoever with sending patches upstream, I was just following directions. I don't want to pester anyone, and I don't have time to replicate this bug on various distros.
Looking at the code I'm quite sure that setting a custom bg color will be disabled on any system running Gnome, which is especially annoying if you use a custom background color for your panel.

As I mentioned above I notified the developer of checkgmail, he is aware of the issue but he won't change the current behaviour because that would break transparency with the default Ubuntu settings (Ambiance theme without a custom background or transparency for the panel). He told me that he might include the fix as a commandline option.

So, I don't think I'm in the position to push this patch. If anybody else wants to submit it somewhere, please feel free to do so.