Create a Thunderbird Plasma Integration add-on (or something)

Brainstorm
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After reading Nate’s Pointed Stick blog recently, i decided i need to try Thunderbird again.

I’ve installed the Flatpak version on Kubuntu 26.04 and some of the first things i noticed were:

  • no autostart at login
  • no minimise at startup
  • no minimise to tray
  • no autostart, minimised to tray

Is it possible to minimise to the notification tray?

Autostart is easy through the settings menu.

I managed to get minimise at start-up to work nicely with a Window Rule:

  1. Open Thunderbird
  2. Open KDE System Settings > Window Rules
  3. Click Add New…
  4. Click Detect Window Properties (near bottom), then click on the Thunderbird window.
  5. In the dialogue box that asks how to identify it, set the Window class (application) to its exact match (e.g., thunderbird), - click the tick :white_check_mark: .
  6. Scroll down to the Size & Position section, find the Minimized property, click it (or tick, then close the box).
  7. In the resultant Size and Position entry for Minimised, ensure Apply Initially and Yes are selected.

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It took a while to find this method, and it’s only part-way there (no minimise to notification tray). I thought maybe it could be made much easier, like the Browser Integration add-on does a variety of good things for Firefox, but i really don’t know, i’m not a developer or engineer.

2

Mozilla needs to actually implement and suppport a system tray icon on Linux.

A fork called Betterbird appears to have this.

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Apparently it’s under development. Maybe now that BetterBird has apparently managed to do it, it won’t be too long…

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/system-tray-support-on-linux/idc-p/29830#M16849

4

This is strange.

According to that thread this was implemented almost exactly 2 years ago and moved into the main repository about a year ago.

This might be how BetterBird got it but that doesn’t explain why it is not available in Thunderbird

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In the Thunderbird settings, under General - Config editor (all the way at the bottom of the page) there is an item called: mail.biff.show_tray_icon_always which is set to false. I double clicked it and restarted Thunderbird but that did not change anything so I reverted to the original value.
I must say I have no idea what mail.biff is but I was hoping it would give me a tray icon.

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Fyi, I’ve been using birdtray to do this for years. Would be great if thunderbird finally supported this officially (I’m kind of reluctant to switch to betterbird, too many weird firefox forks burned me in the past) but so far birdtray has been doing the job well enough for me.

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It was removed after they found issues with the flatpak or something like that, and nobody fixed it since (at least since I last checked).

Correction: it wasn’t flatpak specific, I was mistaking it with Cinny where the problem was that. In Thunderbird’s case it’s just general issues. 1942125 - [meta] linux sys tray icon issues

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Do you use Wayland? I read that BirdTray doesn’t like Wayland.

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Yes, I kind of forgot about that (because it’s been working without issues since setting up), you’ll have to run Thunderbird through XWayland to make it work, there’s issues in the birdtray github repository with more information, but basically birdtray has a setting for the thunderbird command line which you just have to set to /usr/bin/env GDK_BACKEND=x11 /usr/bin/thunderbird and then make sure to always start birdtray instead of thunderbird.

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