Basic setup

gnus-desktop-notify.el provides a simple mechanism to notify external programs when new messages are received. For basic usage, to be used in conjunction with gnus-daemon, put the following:

(require 'gnus-desktop-notify)
(gnus-desktop-notify-mode)
(gnus-demon-add-scanmail)

into your .gnus file. You'll need the notify-send program, which (in Debian or Ubuntu) is available in the libnotify-bin package. Each time a group receives new mail, the notify-send program is called, creating a small popup message containing the name of the group and the number of new messages.

Mac setup

With little customization, you can use gnus-desktop-notify.el on Macs too, by using the popular Growl notification framework. You will need to download and install Growl first, then customize as follows:

(require 'gnus-desktop-notify)
(setq gnus-desktop-notify-function 'gnus-desktop-notify-exec
      gnus-desktop-notify-exec-program "growlnotify -a Emacs.app -m")
(gnus-desktop-notify-mode)
(gnus-demon-add-scanmail)

Advanced setup

By default, all groups are notified when new messages are received. You can exclude a single group by setting the group-notify group parameter to "t" (this is quite common for spammy groups).

You can also selectively monitor groups instead by changing the gnus-desktop-notify-groups variable to 'gnus-desktop-notify-explicit and then manually selecting which groups to include the same way.

Press "G c" in the group buffer to customize group parameters interactively.

See the gnus-desktop-notify customization group for more details.

Download

Download it here:

• gnus-desktop-notify.el: 1.2 (15/01/2011)

Older releases are available in releases/.

Feel free to send suggestions and patches to wavexx@users.sf.net.