GMailbox is Copyright © 2002 Timothy Miller and distributed under the GNU General Public License.

GMailbox is a mailbox checking and summary GNOME applet and/or standalone application. It displays a box containing the sender and subject of the most recent emails you have received, playing configurable sounds when new messages arrive. The message sender is matched against regular expressions to determine the GTK style the sender and subject are each displayed in and to determine the sound played when matching messages arrive. GMailbox may also be configured to unblank the screensaver on certain incoming messages.

GMailbox was inspired by the InterViews toolkit program "mailbox" which just displayed the sender and subject of the last messages. InterViews apparently ceased development in 1993, and its successors, Fresco and Berlin, don't seem to have the mailbox program. In April, 2002, I wanted to find a replacement for this program as the platform it had been running on in our department was being replaced, and it seemed silly to have to port all of InterViews for this one simple program. I searched the web, but, astonishingly, it seems there were no other such mail monitoring programs that displayed the sender and subject, let alone had the other features I was thinking of adding; they all seemed to at best display counts of messages. (I've been told the situation is similar on Windows.) Thus, gmailbox was born.

The current release is an early alpha version, v0.0.1. This web page is incredibly preliminary; see the README file in the file release for a little more information. I plan to add a good deal more detail later. Unfortunately, program installation is currently a pain (must be done manually) and configuration a bigger pain (involves manually editing a web of configuration files), but the core functionality is there and working at present. Currently, only mail in unix "From " format (typical /var/mail/<userid> format) is supported.

The SourceForge project page is located here.

The released files were broken by Gnome 2. For the moment, you can use the CVS files. The README is still up to date except for everything concerning running it as an applet and automatic restarting, both of which are no longer going to be supported. You currently have to start it with the environment variable GMAILBOX_STANDALONE set to get it to do anything at all. The plan is that getting it into the panel or dock or whatever is provided will be done by some swallowing program like gnome-swallow.

For gnome2, copy gmailbox.soundlist to the same path as in the readme, only with .gnome2 rather than .gnome.

The format of the .gnome2/gmailbox fields has changed slightly since the README. The case_*_regexp field now matches against the header rather than just the 'From ' line; you can match against the 'From ' line by doing something like
^From .*(so-and-so@example.com)
Or you can match against, eg, the subject line with
^Subject: some-crazy-subject
It's case insensitive, and multiple-line header entries are folded back into a single line again before this match.

Also, there's now a case_*_soundorder field which should either be an integer or left out entirely (that is, not even having the name listed in an entry, not just saying
case_N_soundorder=
) in which case it defaults to 0. If multiple emails arrive at once, the one with the lowest soundorder value is used to determine the sound to play. If there are multiple emails with the same soundorder value, the corresponding entry which comes first in the .gnome2/gmailbox file is used. This is an advanced feature, so don't worry about it.