Clock and Mailcheck Applet

This is version 1.0 of the Clock and Mailcheck Applet manual.

Table of Contents
ClockMail

ClockMail

The GNOME Clock and mail notify applet (or clockmail_applet for short) is an applet which shows you the current time and how much mail is in your mailbox currently. When more mail arrives, it flashes.

Until October GNOME it was in gnome-core, but it is now distributed with gnome-applets. This part of the guide refers to the applet as distributed in gnome-applets-1.1.2.

To add the clockmail_applet to your panel, you can click mouse button 3 on an empty part of the panel and follow the sequence: + + + + +Applets+ + + + + + ->Clocks+ + + + + + ->Clock and Mailcheck+ + + + + or you can type the following command at a command line: clockmail_applet --activate-goad-server=clockmail_applet

The gnome clock was written by John Ellis (). Please report bugs in it to the GNOME bug tracking system. You can do this by following the guidelines on that site or by using bug-buddy from the command-line. For the package, put gnome-applets.

Usage

You don't need to do anything special to this clock. It will just sit on your panel and tell you the time and how much mail is in your mail inbox. Various options are available with the mouse:

  1. Pressing mouse button 1 brings up a tooltip which shows the current date. It may also start up another program (tyically Balsa, the mail client) for you if this option has been selected in the general preference window.

  2. Holding down mouse button 2 allows you to move the clock about in the same way you move anything on the panel.

  3. Pressing mouse button 3 brings up the standard choices available for applets, including a preferences menu explained below, and an About box.

Preferences

The preferences dialogue box (which calls itself "ClockMail Settings" rather than preferences) is divided in two sections, one for general options, and one for themes.

General preferences

The general preferences tab has a variety of options:

Display time in 12 hours format (AM/PM)

When this checkbox is selected, the time will be shown in a 12-hour format. The default is that this is off and that time is shown as the 24-hour clock.

Display time relative to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)

You can change the timezone mailclock_applet uses. You can either type directly into the small box or use the small arrow buttons to scroll through the options. The time can be anything from twelve hours ahead of GMT to twelve hours behind it. Remember also to apply the checkbox, as otherwise the new timezone will not be used. Note that you can only alter the time by whole hours.

Mail file

This is the file that is checked for new mail. It will probably say /var/spool/mail/yourusername or something similar. If you filter or move mail into another place, you will have to fill it in here. You cannot list multiple files. The applet will only look at one file.

When new mail is received, run...

It is possible to make things happen when new mail arrives. For example, it is very common for people to have a sound file played as mail arrives. You can put the command to run and the file to run it on in this space and ensure the checkbox is checked for it to occur. If you have more than one command, you can separate them by a semi-colon. For example,

  • esdplay /full/path/to/file.wav

  • cd /path/to/directory ; esdplay file.wav

These two have the same effect. You will need the full path for this, without using shortcuts such as cd ~.

Always blink when new mail is waiting

If you select this checkbox, then the graphic will blink until you read your unread email. Normally, this is off, and the blinking lasts a few seconds only.

Number of messages to consider mailbox full

If the mailbox is full, some themes will show this. This setting lets you choose how much email means 'full'.

When clicked, run...

When this is set, clicking button 1 of the mouse on the applet will run a program. The default is to run the Balsa mail client (if it is installed. If it is not installed, nothing will happen). If you don't want anything to be run, just delete whatever is in this box.

Theme preferences

The mailclock_applet comes with a very long list of themes, which it finds in $PREFIX/clockmail/. By default, it uses none of them. Note that not all of them show both the time and the state of your mailbox. Some display only one of those. Just click on a theme and then on the Apply box to change it.

Bugs and Limitations

  1. You can't change the time through the clock properties. This is not really a bug; it's because you must be root to alter the time for the whole of the system, using the date command.

  2. If you adjust the system clock backwards using the date command, the clock will stop working until the system time reaches the time the clock displays. It will start working normally then.

  3. The mailcounter theme gets the number of messages in your inbox wrong.

  4. Several themes do not reshape to the size of a vertical panel and force the panel to be wider.

  5. Doesn't handle multiple mailboxes.