Instant sound notification on new mail?

Question

I'm currently helping a food shop with replacing their overbloated Windows installation by Ubuntu. This went pretty well and the owner is quite happy, but there is still one issue: on Windows, he would use Live Messenger and get instant notifications on new emails. This feature is pretty important since the mails are received from the online shop and needs to be processed immediately. Since the personnel are not looking at the screen all of the time, an audio signal is mandatory.

What software and/ or configuration is recommended to get this kind of notification? The default IM software is Empathy, but it does not seems to have a mail notification feature at all. The mail-notification package can only periodically poll for new mail, but I think that the Hotmail servers restrict the number of logins so this is not a real option either.

Finally, I saw Pidgin as recommendation (I haven't tried the mail notification feature), but perhaps there are better alternatives? Pidgin is actually an IM client, which is not really needed in this case.

Answer 1

Maybe I am not understanding the question properly but Thunderbird is perfectly capable of sound notifications. Assuming it's notification of email only that you want

Then set Thunderbird to check for new mail every 1 min

Answer 2

I see Ryan mentioned Popper already in a comment and that should work for you.

As an alternative you can also try MailNag, which is a non-Ubuntu specific mail notifier. The author describes it this way: "Mailnag is a fork of the Popper mail notifier. What Popper is to Ubuntu's Unity, Mailnag is to GNOME-Shell."

Answer 3

Guifications for Pidgin, mentioned here

Placed here for your convenience.

Install Guifications via Synaptic Package Manager,

Once Installed go to "Tools/Plugins and choose "Guifications",activate it and click on "Configure Plugin" in order to set your preferences. You can set the position, stack, and other display options, the same as Mouse behavior.

Additionally you can set which notifications you want to be notified about and get themes to enhance your GUI notifications.

Note: You might need to disable current notification popups in order not to receive duplicated notifications.

As you can see, you can define The Position, Stack, if you wish to show it while away (really useful!), animation, how long must a message last on screen defined by "Display time" (in order not to lose any purchase order for your clients) and the mouse behavior, among other useful configurable things which includes but not limits to:

Notifications, will let you select which events you wish to be notified about.

Advanced options, including the maximum visible guifications and if you are using dual view monitors, choose where will the guifications be placed.

Good Luck!