How to control notifications on Thunderbird for Linux (Pop!_OS)
I'm in the process of moving from MacOS to Linux, in particular the latest LTS version of Pop!_OS. I disliked their default email client intensely, and therefore installed whichever version of Thunderbird was available from their repository. Unfortunately I do not know how to determine the version of either POP!_OS or Thunderbird, so I can't be more precise. My apologies for that. (Where *is* Pop!_OS/Thunderbird's version of Mac's "About ..." menu item anyway?!)
For those unfamiliar with POP!_OS, it's a Ubuntu derivative, and its desktop management is built on gnome 3. Its version numbers also match Ubuntu. Most of the time, instructions for Ubuntu found on the web work for Pop!_OS, at least if they are relatively recent.
I'm being plagued by pop-ups from Thunderbird notifying me of each new email received. I want them gone. Googling for instructions has given me recipes involving menu items that don't appear anywhere in the version of Thunderbird I have. In one case (only) instructions said to look somewhere else on linux; perhaps you export drastically different user interfaces on each operating system?
On the other hand, I don't get a count of unread messages associated with Thunderbird's icon in the Pop!_OS dock, and I do want that. (Is that even possible on linux?)
So two questions in one posting: 1) How can I get rid of pop-up notifications of new email messages? 2) (How) can I get a count of unread emails associated with the dock icon?
Thanks in advance for any assistance, including RTFM links.
All Replies (2)
Your using Linux. Probably 90-95% of people use windows, so instructions to see will be written for windows, unless they are specifically mentioned as being for Linux.
So I will give you a handy menu table to find the Linux equivalent location when the menu reference is for another operating system.
Menu item Windows Linux Mac OS X Options / Preferences Tools → Settings... Edit → Preferences Thunderbird→ Preferences... Thunderbird → Preferences... Account Settings Tools → Account Settings Edit → Account Settings Tools → Account Settings...
(my understanding is that there are efforts to align the menu designations, so it might edit > settings. If it is I would appreciate knowing that. I only use windows)
So the path would be to edit preferences and search for notif and set the notifications to your preference.
Thank you. It turned out that the control was in a menu called settings, which could be accessed either from the Edit menu (possibly visible only if you enable all toolbars) or from the old style hamburger menu on the right side of the list-of-messages screen.
That settings menu has no visible scrollbar - unless you try to scroll it. So since the UI told me plainly that the window was not scrollable, it never occurred to me to scroll down (or up) looking for choices not originally visible.
If I know that a control is supposed to be on a particular screen, and it's not present, I'll generally try scrolling down and even up, whether or not there's a scrollbar visible. But if I don't know where to find a control, and don't see a scrollbar while stepping through all the menus looking for it, it never seems to occur to me that a screen or menu without a scrollbar might be scrollable.
At any rate, this may have solved my problem. I did get one more unwanted notification after turning this setting off, and found the setting was somehow back on again, but hopefully that won't happen again. (I sometimes have problems where my attempts to click once are mis-registered as two clicks in succession; I hope this is the reason my change didn't stick, rather than some bug.)
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