Thynderbird sounds -

[Tim]

On Fri, 2010-07-09 at 05:40 -0400, Bob Goodwin wrote:
>     Tim, this is one of the rare cases where you are wrong or perhaps
>     don't understand what Thunderbird does? As it is now I have it set
>     to "Play a sound" when an e-mail arrives
>     [/usr/share/sounds/purple/alert.wav]. The result is a musical chord
>     that plays several times an hour as e-mail is collected. Over the
>     past eighty years I've developed selective hearing and usually don't
>     even hear it unless I am waiting for a response to a "text message"
>     or some such that may require immediate action on my part.
> 
>     I receive hundreds of messages each day, those sounds only occur one
>     time when a slug of messages is received and are not repeated
>     endlessly until the user kills them. 

I think it's more a case you not realising what you're going to get.  As
I said, I've done that sort of thing in the past, and I'm aware of what
will happen.

Before you were talking about marking messages with filters.  Filters
work on each messages as they come through, one by one.  If piles of
messages were marked, piles of sounds would play.  Twelve messages
match, twelve dings get played.  One hundred messages get hit by the
filter, one hundred dings.  

And that was what I was getting at with the going off like a jackpot
bell.  If you queue up a hundred sound effects, they play one after
another, until each sample finishes playing.  That can last a long time,
depending on your sample, and the number of times it was triggered.  Not
a case of a bell ringing until manually silenced.

All I've seen in Thunderbird is an option to play a sound at the end of
a run, with no options to affect it depending on what mail went through
(perhaps you should try a more attention-getting sound sample).  Or
filtering options for sorting/highlighting.  Unlike some other programs,
it didn't have a way to run external programs.  Even if it did, you'd
still need to overcome the problem I mention.

Let me demonstrate, in a different way:  Mail comes in, one message is
filtered, play sound, one message isn't filtered, another message is
filtered, play sound, another message is filtered, play sound, another
message is filtered, play sound. etc., etc., etc.

Every time you see "play sound," above, it plays a sound.

To simply call something to play a sound, would mean multiple triggers.
You'd need to have some sort of one-shot routine which would only play
one side when a pile of triggers came in, within a certain time frame,
rather than playing a sound for each trigger.

Given the lack of options with Thunderbird, I think you'd either need to
try another client.  Watch a folder, directly, to do an alert when the
contents change (a file function, nothing to do with email).  Or run a
separate email watchdog program.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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