PopTray Minus v1.1

I've started this project after moving to Linux. I tried to find a good replacement for a very convenient windows tool — Poptray. Unfortunately, there was no linux-based alternative at the moment, so I had to roll my own. I did not plan to add any new features, but ony implement a useful subset of what we had in PopTray. Hence the name — PopTray Minus.

What does it do?

PopTray Minus...

stays in the tray

checks message headers in my POP3 mailboxes

applies basic filters based on from/to/subj contents

allows a sneak peek to preview the message body

has a very handy delete button to manually remove unwanted messages

PopTray Minus works just fine with GNOME as well as with KDE. Mac OS X and Windows are also supported but not tested yet.

Any screenshots?

Download progress (Ubuntu/GNOME) Mailbox statistics (Ubuntu/GNOME) New mail notification (Kubuntu/KDE) Message selection (Kubuntu/KDE) Message preview (Ubuntu/GNOME)

How to use PopTray Minus?

Left click on the tray icon brings up the main window with the message list. Another left click on the icon hides it back.

PopTray Minus does not stop running even when the main window is gone. You have to right click on the icon and select "Quit" in the menu if you really want to quit.

Main window (as well as all other windows) can also be dismissed with Esc key or click on the close icon in the window corner.

When run for the first time, PopTray Minus asks for user/password information (press "+" sign to create account). Later, this information could be changed in "Settings" menu available with a right click on the tray icon.

Downloads

The following versions of the PopTray Minus are available for download:

Debian package should install on most recent versions without any problem, otherwise you may need to download source tarball and install manually with "python setup.py install"

Requrements

Python and PyQt 4.4 (required)

KDE or GNOME (recommended)

UIDL support on POP3 server (recommended)

PopTray Minus is written in Python using PyQt4 GUI libraries, so these two things are required. Fortunately, Python is already installed and PyQt4 is available for installation on the most Linux distributions. If you use Windows or Mac OS X your mileage may vary. If you are using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, you have PyQt 4.3 installed by default, but PopTray Minus requires version 4.4, please check this How To Install PyQt 4.4 for Ubuntu 8.04 hardy page.

Main idea is to hide in the tray, so we need a good X11 based GUI manager that implements the freedesktop.org system tray specification (recent versions of KDE and GNOME). According to the PyQt4 manuals, Windows and Mac OS X may also be supported but I haven't checked it yet.

POP3 server with UIDL support is almost required. UIDL is important because it allows us to track messages between POP3 sessions while other programs may access and/or modify the mailbox contents. If your server lacks UIDL, you won't be able to preview/delete messages, however message list and basic from/to/subj filters should work just fine.

Technical details

Mailbox is open every NN minutes (can be changed in "Settings", default: 15), message headers are retrieved, blacklisted messages are removed and mailbox is closed again. Countdown timer until the next mailbox rescan is reset only when the box is already closed to avoid dealing with short rescan intervals and large mailboxes.

Current filter system only supports substring search within from/to/subj fields of the message header. Please, be careful, searching for a single letter may easily kill all you mail. It's a good idea to include as much as possible in the search pattern to avoid dangerous mistakes. Patterns shorter than 4 characters are not allowed. Actually, PopTray Minus will complain if you blacklisting pattern is too short.

Preview/Delete works only is server supports UIDL. Only one message can be previewed (button grays out if several messages are selected), though Delete can kill many messages at once.

"Score" column shows Spamassassin score if it's configured on your server. Positive scores are shown in red and negative scores are shown in green.

Thanks

Thank your for using PopTray Minus! Also I woudl like to thank the original creator of PopTray — Renier Crause, who gave me the idea, Trolltech for Qt toolkit, Phil Thompson for PyQt bindings, Guido van Rossum for Python and Mark Summerfield for his book and code snippets.