Mozilla's Thunderbird team has fixed a 24-year-old feature bug, bringing system tray emails to the GNOME and KDE desktop environments for Linux users.
Mozilla Thunderbird Mail Server Settings
The missing interface capability, reported back on Friday 12 November 1999, was closed on Monday 22 July. Those using Thunderbird with applicable Linux computers should now see an appropriate system tray message when receiving new email.
Some effort was made in 2004 to come up with an XPI component that provided the same messaging functionality found in the Windows version of Thunderbird, but it did not work.
In 2006, there was a complaint wondering why it has been so difficult to implement an email notification icon in the system tray for Unix-like desktop environments. That bug replied: "Welcome to Mozilla's bugzilla! Don't worry, you'll get used to it. And patience is a virtue ;)"
