Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

How to disable annoying mail notification settings popup on every user GNOME login in Ubuntu 10.10

OME login in Ubuntu 10.10 I just completed a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick-Merkaat install.
Following the installation I used a small script to install a bunch of packages I used on the same notebook before the Ubuntu re-installation.

Now after the number of packages are installed on the newly installed Ubuntu, everytime I login with any GNOME user account I get mail notification settings window to automatically start-up

Closing on every gnome login session the mail settings is not a pleasent experience, therefore I took a bit of seconds to find out what launches the New Mail pop-up window

Here is how the annoying window looks like everytime I login on my ubuntu:



Some of the text on the above screenshot is in Bulgarian as the default configured locale for this Ubuntu install is set to Bulgarian but I hope this doesn't matter as other people who have the same popup can still recognize the window.

Now to find out the process which spawned the mail notification popup I issued:

root@ubuntu:~# ps ax |grep -i mail 2651 pts/1 Sl+ 0:01 mail-notification --sm-disable


Further on I checked what is the original location of mail notification command :

root@ubuntu:~# which mail-notification
/usr/bin/mail-notification


To be absolutely sure mail-notification does spawn the mail settings window I used pkill -9 mail-notification

As the window suddenly died now I was absolutely sure that mail-notification is spawning the unwanted pop-up window which appeared right after me logging in.

I used dpkg -S to check which package does the mail-notification program belong to as I thought that the solution to get rid of this annoying popup will come to removing the whole package, here is what I did:

root@ubuntu:~# dpkg -S /usr/bin/mail-notification
mail-notification: /usr/bin/mail-notification
root@ubuntu:~#


Now knowing the package I simply wiped it off:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get remove --yes mail-notification
...
root@ubuntu:~# dpkg --purge mail-notification
...


After that I guarantee you you won't see the irritating new mail settings pop-up window again.
Farewell mail-notification annoyance, hope to never see you again!!! :)