MesQuilla

Controlling notification with filters

Today I will write in a more practical direction, describing how to setup Thunderbird with MesQuilla extensions to control notification.

Under stock Thunderbird, notification of arriving emails (sometimes called BIFF) may be controlled in two ways – and both of these are system-wide settings. These features are controlled from the General/Options dialog:

“Show an alert” adds a small popup in the system tray when an email is received, while “Play a sound” can play a single system-wide sound.

Now if you have a complex setup, then this is not nearly enough control to be practical. I for example have some high-volume emails lists that I receive, plus for testing purposes I keep both IMAP and POP versions of my main account. I really don’t want to be notified in any way for the email lists, nor for the IMAP account receipts. Also, I like to hear sounds only on special emails, not on everything. So, how do you setup a more practical method of controlling notification?

We have 2 extensions that can help with this, ToneQuilla and FiltaQuilla. FiltaQuilla adds a new filter action, “Do Not Notify” that prevents an alert popup for occurring when a message matching that filter is received. ToneQuilla plays a particular sound as a filter action. So the way to have control of your notifications is to turn on the “Show an Alert” notification in Thunderbird (and suppress it for particular emails with a filter), and turn off the “Play a Sound” notification (and add it back for particular types of emails with a filter).

So, for example, for the email list ICCM, my filter is configured like this:

That is, I turn off notification (which is the little popup) and then move the message to a folder.

When I want to play sounds, I turn on sounds for particular classes of emails using ToneQuilla. For example, I like to know when I receive a bugmail message, so bugmail has the following filter:

My wife particularly likes the “we are in Love” sound bite that plays whenever I get an email from her!

With this combination of features, I think that you will find notification in Thunderbird can be controlled now in a useful manner.