Thunderbird & Ubuntu 10.04
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010Thunderbird 3 comes with Ubuntu 10.04, but sadly it doesn’t integrate with the default desktop as well as it could — it doesn’t link to the envelope icon in the Indicator Applet, and it uses its own popups instead of the libnotify mechanism Ubuntu prefers.
These are easily fixed, however …
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9150987 tells us how to add Thunderbird to the menu, along with actions such as Compose New Message and Contacts (read the whole thread to see how Calendar would work if you had Lightning installed); but it doesn’t address how to get notifications working.
The experimental libnotify-mozilla XPI for Thunderbird itself, on the other hand, provides the notification of new mail — but if Thunderbird is not running, or if there are no new messages, nothing will be visible in the Indicator.
http://ubublogger.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/how-to-install-the-experimental-version-of-libnotify-mozilla/
A combination of these two still doesn’t produce a perfect solution, but it’s good enough until Ubuntu & Mozilla sort themselves out and get Thunderbird capable of replacing Evolution on the desktop fully.
