Try Pidgin with the webMail Notifier plugin, If Pidgin is too much for just mail notification, then try if mail-notification available in the repositories will work, for mail-notification to work with some Yahoo e-mail accounts you may have to pay for the Yahoo pop3 service.
If you do not yet have a Yahoo account or would like to create another one here is a little tip; When signing up with Yahoo you can select a country that Yahoo allows free pop services as described here; http://www.techiecorner.com/126/free-yahoo-pop3-email-account-yahoo-mail-sg-and-hk/, I tried this and the account created does allow pop3 service to be enabled.
If you search for "gmail" in Synaptic you'll see a number of packages for gmail notifiers. Also Prism IIRC can notify from the panel. I've used checkgmail in the past and liked it, but not enough to reinstall it.
You may also want to look into CloudSn. It's a notifier that runs through your Indicator Applet (or the tray) and connects to gmail, twitter, identi.ca and POP email accounts.
There is a package in the repositories called mail-notification. I have only tested it with Hotmail (Outlook.com) and under MATE. I won't say that it works perfectly, but here are some tips for getting connected:
Despite there being an option for "Windows Live Hotmail", you should use "POP3" Mailbox type
Server: pop-mail.outlook.com (could change over time)
Username: Your full email address
Connection: "SSL/TLS on separate port", Port: 995
Hotmail-specific setup guidelines may be found by web-searching for something like "Set up an email app with Outlook.com". You may need to specifically enable POP access in your account.
Alternatively, you could setup a full email client, and hopefully that will include a new-mail notifier. I attempted this with Evolution, and the client is working reasonably well, but the notifier isn't working great (under MATE desktop on Ubuntu 14.04).
Long story short, expect some trial-and-error if you want an email notifier. mail-notification seems to be sort of working for me, but it has been hard to test -- for some reason, the indicator doesn't want to turn on when I expect it to (like a watched pot never boils). Explicitly updating when you know that there is new mail doesn't do the trick -- you just have to wait (for an unspecified period). Also complicating the testing is the error: "Exceeded the login limit for a 15 minute period. Reduce the frequency of requests to the POP3 server" -- if you do too much experimenting.
Other issues with the mail-notification package:
Not under active development
Doesn't differentiate multiple accounts, or provide any kind of status details
Commentary: I think the mail notification feature has been a "collateral damage" of the recent innovation in desktops (esp. Gnome 3 and Unity). It is not easy to create an email notifier that works with a variety of server types. Combining that with something that works with a variety of desktop environments makes for a huge development headache.
It's a shame though, since this is a very valuable feature.
Try Pidgin with the webMail Notifier plugin, If Pidgin is too much for just mail notification, then try if mail-notification available in the repositories will work, for mail-notification to work with some Yahoo e-mail accounts you may have to pay for the Yahoo pop3 service.
If you do not yet have a Yahoo account or would like to create another one here is a little tip; When signing up with Yahoo you can select a country that Yahoo allows free pop services as described here; http://www.techiecorner.com/126/free-yahoo-pop3-email-account-yahoo-mail-sg-and-hk/, I tried this and the account created does allow pop3 service to be enabled.
Lastly, even though you did not ask for this, try this addon for Firefox available here; https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4490/ you may like it.
for Ubuntu 12.04
You may also like Popper.
Unfortunately the development of Popper was discontinued. Therefore the last version published was for 12.04 LTS.
If you search for "gmail" in Synaptic you'll see a number of packages for gmail notifiers. Also Prism IIRC can notify from the panel. I've used checkgmail in the past and liked it, but not enough to reinstall it.
You may also want to look into CloudSn. It's a notifier that runs through your Indicator Applet (or the tray) and connects to gmail, twitter, identi.ca and POP email accounts.
There is a package in the repositories called
mail-notification. I have only tested it with Hotmail (Outlook.com) and under MATE. I won't say that it works perfectly, but here are some tips for getting connected:Hotmail-specific setup guidelines may be found by web-searching for something like "Set up an email app with Outlook.com". You may need to specifically enable POP access in your account.
Alternatively, you could setup a full email client, and hopefully that will include a new-mail notifier. I attempted this with Evolution, and the client is working reasonably well, but the notifier isn't working great (under MATE desktop on Ubuntu 14.04).
Long story short, expect some trial-and-error if you want an email notifier.
mail-notificationseems to be sort of working for me, but it has been hard to test -- for some reason, the indicator doesn't want to turn on when I expect it to (like a watched pot never boils). Explicitly updating when you know that there is new mail doesn't do the trick -- you just have to wait (for an unspecified period). Also complicating the testing is the error: "Exceeded the login limit for a 15 minute period. Reduce the frequency of requests to the POP3 server" -- if you do too much experimenting.Other issues with the
mail-notificationpackage:Commentary: I think the mail notification feature has been a "collateral damage" of the recent innovation in desktops (esp. Gnome 3 and Unity). It is not easy to create an email notifier that works with a variety of server types. Combining that with something that works with a variety of desktop environments makes for a huge development headache.
It's a shame though, since this is a very valuable feature.