LGMTray: Lightweight GMail Notifier

About

LGMTray is a lightweight application that docks in your system tray, and notifies you when new mail has arrived on your GMail account.

It is written in C++, is designed to have very few dependencies, and can therefore be easily built on many systems. Currently, only an X11 implementation is available (which uses the FreeDesktop.org System Tray Protocol), and the features are very limited.

Download

Usage

Copy the sample configuration file lgmtray.sample_config, rename it to ~/.lgmtray, and edit it to reflect your username/password and preferences. Then, simply run the application by calling lgmtray.

Building

First, make sure you have the necessary libraries installed. LGMTray currently needs the following libraries:

libcurl (with OpenSSL support)
libxml2
libxpm
Xlib (ships with your X installation)

To build the project, run

	make

If you have a special system setup, you should edit Makefile.config to reflect this in the build parameters.

Known Issues

On one of my machines, Curl crashes very regularly with a SIGPIPE when opening a connection. I have reported this to the Curl developers, but no cause has been found so far. As a workaround, LGMTray currently ignores SIGPIPE signals, and continues as normal. This should have no visual impact, except log messages saying that there was a problem, and that the application continues anyway.

TODO

Allow the background of the tray to be transparent, taking the system tray’s background color.
Make the check interval dynamic, where mail is checked more frequently after new mail has arrived, less frequently when there is no mouse movement, …
Open GMail when the icon is clicked
Add a tooltip and a context menu