The Cool Country Consulting Blog

After the latest update, Thunderbird now is adament that I have new email, even when it’s just Junk. Different to my last problem where I was getting new mail notification for SpamAssassin tagged messages. So, after a bit of research, managed to find a new extension for Thunderbird that works around this issue…

Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2610/

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Mailbox Alert 0.9, by Jelte, released on Aug 6, 2006

Mailbox Alert allows you to specify, for each seperate mail folder, a message, sound and/or a system command that will be executed when new mail is found there.

This way, you specify different actions for less important folders, or no action at all.

Works with: Thunderbird 1.0 – 2.0.0.* ALL
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Well worth the download if just for a bit of fun. Sadly it doesn’t give you a semi-permanent new mail flag in the task bar, but it can make any noise you like to alert you 🙂

Curiously, the built in New Mail tray icon refuses to go away even when it’s turned off in ThunderBird.

(or VersaMail will not remove mail from the POP3 server)

In my continuing interesting experience with the Palm TX (or palm T|X) I am now having some fun with VersaMail sometimes not removing mail from the server after checking.

The last current solution to this problem that seems to have worked was to go into the hotsync utility, choose custom, VersaMail, Advanced, and untick a few boxes there.

My setup is unique – I have a main mailbox which is checked by Thunderbird – but which is also set at the server to redirect a copy to an Australian host. (The auzzie.net address is US hosted so POP3 latency can be frustrating when borrowing a web connection.) Since SpamAssassin flags the SPAM (which is probably 70-90% of my mail) it’s not convenient to download the SPAM onto the Palm and then filter it – more time, more RAM, more latency, more risk of a bus passing and dropping the borrowed wireless connection when down the street…)

…So the solution is to use MailMon Free (A real bugger to download – eventually found it at http://www.communicator.pl/MailMon.exe – what’s the go with simtel.net – is it just an advertising site with no content or something??) It can be set to repeatedly poll a mailbox and remove messages meeting certain criteria. For me it was anything over 1MB and anything with *****SPAM***** in the subject line.

So now if I’m travelling, the Palm can get the sanitised mail where I can find 802.11 coverage. In other cases, the pricey GPRS mobile (LG U8120) can fetch the summaries. (Those two products won’t communicate.)

Will post an update if it happens again and I find another solution.

Later edit: This program still gave me problems. In the end, VersaMail was dumped and SnapperMail was used instead. Gmail is used to filter the junk and then forward to a normal POP3 account.

Mozilla Thunderbird New Mail Notification Extension

I have been looking for an extension that would control the New Mail Notification icon for Thunderbird, but there isn’t one that I can find.

However, I did discover a reason why it was misbehaving, and perhaps if you have found this post, it will help you too…

I had a mail filtering rule set to move *SPAM* messages to the Trash folder – but Thunderbird was still counting them as messages that deserved the flag. However, changing this filtering rule to “Delete the message” gives the same effect of moving the message to the Trash folder, but doesn’t cause the New Mail Notification flag to appear.

Tech note: Another way you *could* make the computer do what you want is to monitor the size of the file that contains your messages. (ie inbox.) How you do that is up to you. There’s a program called FCMon.exe, (Folder Change Monitor) but the site it lives on is one of those useless sites on the ‘net where you click to download, only to find it’s not there any more. (It is, but it’s behind an FTP url that won’t accept a login.)