Mailnotify

The mailnotify daemon generates pop-up notifications on incoming email messages by monitoring a log file which records information about incoming email, in particular the From: and Subject: email headers. Such an email log file is usually written by programs like fdm or procmail.

mailnotify can be a useful utility in any X11 (or Wayland) environment with no complex desktop system. It was originally written for my Xmonad setup.

mailnotify relies on a running notification daemon, like dunst or similar.

Usage

Invoking mailnotify with no arguments prints the help message about its usage:

mailnotify - Pop-up notification on received email.

Usage: mailnotify [--version] <mail-log> [-i|--icon <icon>] 
                  [-t|--timeout <timeout>]

  Mailnotify generates pop-up notifications about incoming email messages.

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  --version                Show version
  <mail-log>               Mail log file
  -i,--icon <icon>         Icon name or file
                           (default: "mail-unread-symbolic.symbolic")
  -t,--timeout <timeout>   Possible timeouts: `default` use system's default;
                           `infinite` no timeout; N in seconds.
                           (default: Infinite)

For example, assuming that you are using fdm to regularly retrieve your email, you could start mailnotify from your .xinitrc with a command like this:

mailnotify ~/.local/log/fdm.log &> ~/.local/log/x11/mailnotify.log &

mailnotify would then log any error encountered into mailnotify.log, otherwise it produces no output apart from an initial startup message.

Install

Compiled static binaries

Each release contains a compiled static executable of mailnotify built on the most recent Ubuntu LTS platform. That should work on most Linux distributions. You can download the latest one from here. Check the sha256 check sum of the downloaded file. Rename it to mailnotify, made it executable and put somewhere in your search path.

Archlinux

For Archlinux users there is also a package on AUR: mailnotify-bin

Building from sources

To build mailnotify from source you need a Haskell development environment. Either your platform package system can provide this or you can use ghcup. Once you have the ghc Haskell compiler and cabal etc. installed, follow the steps below.

External dependencies are libgtk2.0-dev and libnotify-dev on Debian derivatives, or libnotify and gtk2 on Arch derivatives. These must be installed before cabal is invoked.

Clone this repository and invoke cabal:

git clone https://github.com/pdobsan/mailnotify.git
cd mailnotify
cabal update
cabal install

mailnotify is known to build with ghc 8.10.7 and ghc 9.2.4.

License

mailnotify is released under the 3-Clause BSD License, see the file LICENSE.