Nifty Gmail Checker (checkgmail)

[poofyhairguy]

Written By arnieboy

Checkgmail is a nifty perl program which sits in your system tray and checks your gmail account. looks almost like its windows counterpart.
there are other alternatives like the firefox gmail checker (got to have firefox open for that), kcheckgmail (the latest version has dependency problems with ubuntu libs) and the gdesklets sidecandy gmail checker which also is pretty good. but if u want a gmail checker which sits unobtrusively in ur system tray and works flawlessly u should check this one out. Herez how to install it:
first download the compressed file from a mirror of your choice:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/checkgmail/checkgmail-1.3.tar.bz2?download

Now do the following:

sudo apt-get install lynx ncftp libgtk2-trayicon-perl openssl libssl-dev make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gcc

Next do the following:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::LWP'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Crypt::Simple'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install XML::Simple'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Crypt::SSLeay'

All the above commands will configure your system and ask a bunch of simple questions which should be easy enough to answer (in my case almost all of them were defaults). They will install the perl modules.
Now do the following:

tar -xjf checkgmail-1.3.tar.bz2

now a folder called checkgmail-1.3 will be created in your home folder and inside it will be the checkgmail perl binary which u need to add to system-->preferences-->sessions-->startup programs
The path of the executable would be /home/user_name/checkgmail-1.3/checkgmail
U can also open a nautilus window and double click on /home/user_name/checkgmail-1.3/checkgmail to make it run (or run it from terminal). next time u boot in to GNOME it will start automatically and u will see how nifty and unobtrusive it is.
please note: "user_name" is the name of your user account.

EDIT: this is a tip for those who dont share their comps with others. dont log out of gmail in your web browser (just close the browser window) and everytime gmailchecker informs u of new mail, one single click on the icon will take you to your inbox without your having to type your user name and password in the browser again.

[zeroverse]

Thanks. The script works great. It would be awesome if you could click on individual emails to go directly to them, but I'm impressed nevertheless.

[Adder]

Thank you Poofy. That worked like a charm.

[majikstreet]

This was great on hoary, still great on breezy

[gasparov]

Hi,

Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running install for module HTML::Tagset
Running make for S/SB/SBURKE/HTML-Tagset-3.04.tar.gz
  Is already unwrapped into directory /home/gas/.cpan/build/HTML-Tagset-3.04
  Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running make for G/GA/GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.45.tar.gz
  Is already unwrapped into directory /home/gas/.cpan/build/HTML-Parser-3.45
  Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

what am I missing?...i do have build-essential

[Adam Lee]

It seems this checker only checks mails in Inbox.
I label most of my emails because I get 20 different emails every hour and only few actually goes in to inbox.

[daviddehoog]

It seems this checker only checks mails in Inbox.
I label most of my emails because I get 20 different emails every hour and only few actually goes in to inbox.

Evolution can handle gmail accounts (through POP3) ...

Alternatively, use fetchmail to pull your gmail down with POP3, and use a standard desktop mail checker to monitor your Maildir ?

Not as snazzy as the googlechecker ... but functional

Cheers
David

[hanzj]

I ran:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Crypt::Simple'

And I'm getting this output:

--21:40:31-- ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...S/CHECKSUMS.gz
(try: 5) => `-'
Connecting to ftp.perl.org|163.143.1.21|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Error in server response, closing control connection.
Retrying.

--21:40:36-- ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...S/CHECKSUMS.gz
(try: 6) => `-'
Connecting to ftp.perl.org|163.143.1.21|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Error in server response, closing control connection.
Retrying.

On and on it goes retrying. But to no avail.


I then tried the next step:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install XML::Simple'

I got the following output:

CPAN: Storable loaded ok
Going to read /home/hanzj/.cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:00:32 GMT
Running install for module XML::Simple
Running make for G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
LWP failed with code[500] message[]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz

Trying with "/usr/bin/lynx -source" to get
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz

Looking up ftp.perl.org
Making FTP connection to ftp.perl.org
Looking up ftp.perl.org
Making FTP connection to ftp.perl.org
Can't Access `ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz'
Alert!: Unable to access document.

lynx: Can't access startfile

System call "/usr/bin/lynx -source "ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz" > /home/hanzj/cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar"
returned status 1 (wstat 256)
Warning: expected file [/home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz] doesn't exist

Trying with "/usr/bin/ncftpget" to get
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
Remote host has closed the connection.
Remote host has closed the connection.
Remote host has closed the connection.
ncftpget: cannot open ftp.perl.org: remote host closed control connection.

System call "cd /home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM && /usr/bin/ncftpget "ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz" "
returned status 1 (wstat 256)
Warning: expected file [/home/hanzj/cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz] doesn't exist

Trying with "/usr/bin/wget -O -" to get
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
--01:49:52-- ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
=> `-'
Resolving ftp.perl.org... 163.143.1.21
Connecting to ftp.perl.org|163.143.1.21|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Error in server response, closing control connection.
Retrying.

--01:49:53-- ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
(try: 2) => `-'
Connecting to ftp.perl.org|163.143.1.21|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Error in server response, closing control connection.
Retrying.

I cancel the process by pressing Ctrl-C. Then I run the command again. The final part out the output says:

--01:52:18-- ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz
(try:20) => `-'
Connecting to ftp.perl.org|163.143.1.21|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ...
Error in server response, closing control connection.
Giving up.


System call "/usr/bin/wget -O - "ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz" > /home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar"
returned status 1 (wstat 256)
Warning: expected file [/home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz] doesn't exist
Issuing "/usr/bin/ftp -n"
Not connected.
Local directory now /home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Not connected.
Bad luck... Still failed!
Can't access URL ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/...le-2.14.tar.gz.

Please check, if the URLs I found in your configuration file () are valid.
The urllist can be edited. E.g. with 'o conf urllist push ftp://myurl/'

Could not fetch authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz
Giving up on '/home/hanzj/.cpan/sources/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.14.tar.gz'
Note: Current database in memory was generated on Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:00:32 GMT

What's going on?

[mustang]

This is probably a dumb question but is there a way to modify the script so that instead of single clicking, double clicking on the system tray icon would open up your gmail account in a browser?

[_Kris_]

Will there be a feature in the future to add a PROXY server?
The Gmail checker can't reach gmail when I'm @ work

Thx!