Gnubiff is a program designed to notify about new emails, but this is not its only feature. It supports: pop3, apop, imap4, mh, qmail and mailfile protocols. It also supports SSL and certificates. You can add it as an applet in GNOME pannels. It can even automatically detect the configuration of your mailbox. What is crucial, it does not overload the system.

Installation

The program is present in reposiotries of majority of distributions. In Debian and derived distros (like Ubuntu) you can install it by typing in a console windows:

sudo apt-get install gnubiff

You can also use Synaptic package manager. In other distributions, just use your favorite application for installing apps or do it manually. Here you can read more about TODO: installing applications in Linux.

After you got Gnubiff installed, you should add its applet to your GNOME pannel. Right mouse click on the panel -> Add to panel…-> should do the job. Look for the penguin logo of Gnubiff there.

Configuration

Click on the penguin and choose Preferences->Mailboxes.

You need to fill in all the fields as described below:

• Name - any name for our account (Onet in our case)
• Type - we choose the protocol here (POP3 in our case)
• Address - path to the file or directory (if we have a mail server on our computer) or the remote address of the mail server (pop3.poczta.onet.pl in our case)
• Username - the username in the mail system, it is test@op.pl in our case (you have to check the settings of your account, as it might as well be that the proper username for your account is the text before the “@” sign, without the domain name (in our case it would be just “test”).
• Password - password

More connection options can be defined in the Details section:

• Connection - we can choose the standard port or enter manually another one
• Authentication - we can choose authentication method: autmatically, login/password. for apop protocol, via SSL, via SSL with certificate, we have chosen login/password
• Delay - how often should the program check for new messages (3 minutes by default)

After everything is set, just press Apply and OK. To add another account you repeat the same procedure once again.

Additional settings

Mailbox tab

When new mail - we can configure what should be done, if a new message arrives - for example a sound can be played; I have unchecked this function
When double-cliked - what happens when you double-click the Gnubiff icon

Applet or Biff tab

Font - we set up the font for the number of unread emails
When new mail (how the icon for new emails should look like) - you can adjust it to look like in Pango style
When no mail (for no new messages)

Popup tab

Display for - how long will the notification with the topic of new email be displayed

It looks like this:

That’s about it for this little but very helpful application. I hope it helped you a bit and perhaps Gnubiff will find its place into your GNOME desktop