981769 - Unable to disable sound notification OSX

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Jacob]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.45 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Set the preferences to.

When new messages arrive:
Animate the dock icon: On
Show an alert: On
Play a sound: Off

v.28.0b1, released: March 7, 2013
OS X 10.8.5


Actual results:

A sound is played for every mail received.


Expected results:

No sound should've been played.

Note: If alert is OFF no sound is played.

Comment 1

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Confirming on latest Daily trunk on OS X 10.9

Comment 2

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Looking at Notification settings on OS X System Preferences, there is a sound related check-box. When on TB the "alert when a new message arrives" is unchecked, a notification will not be triggered and then a sound -originating on OS X, not on TB- will NOT be played.

Then, a workaround would be to uncheck OS X Notification setting so it doesn't plays a sound when icon animates when receiving a new message.

Comment 3

[Dorthe]

I have the same problem  since I upgraded to V 31 today. I disabled the sounds in Thunderbird first, still playing the new-mail-sound. I fixed it for me disabling the notifications in the system settings as Javi Rueda described above. It feels like a bug nevertheless.

Comment 4

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I have had an idea. The sound which is annoying user (confusing, in fact) is coming from OS X when we update the text on the badge. User can disable this sound as I said in previous comments. Reading through Apple reference material, it seems this preference could be retrieved by reading showsApplicationBadge (I have opened bug 1071494, as we are not able to read it from an XPCOM application, AFAIK).

The way I would fix this is:

- Get the showsApplicationBadge value (that is what I requested this one and not setShowsApplicationBadge).
- If it is false, OS X will not play a sound, so no change would be make by us on our preference window, on the General tab.

- If it is true, however, anytime we update the badge, OS X *will* play a sound -which is not configurable, by the way-. Then, if our user sets Thunderbird to play a sound when a new message arrives, he/she will hear two sound, although Thunderbird one will be played because a new message has arrived, not because we are updating the text on the badge. This is confusing to the user.

       - So, to avoid this confusion, we should then disable the preference UI for playing a sound, don't know exactly if we should make those invisible or just disable them. (Thoughts on this, Blake?)

Comment 5

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

Definitely don't make them invisible, otherwise people will go crazy trying to find them.  ;)
If we do disable them, we should have a note explaining why (and how to enable them) above the disabled controls.

Comment 6

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Look my bug 1096070 comment 1. That is a new bug on the untriaged category. Bug is almost certainly a dupe of this one, but I am waiting for the reporter to answer a question before marking it as a DUPLICATE.

Comment 7

[Sum Yung Guy]

Since OS X 10.8, display of notifications - alert banners/dialogs, badges, and notification sounds - are now the responsibility of the operating system, not the application. The application should always send the notification signal, and let the OS determine whether and how to convey it to the user, based on the user's Notifications preferences settings. If the application offers its own options to disable notifications, it breaks the Notification Center system. There must not be two different places to enable/disable alerts, badges, or notification sounds, since they could conflict with each other. The correct place to enable/disable them is only in Notifications preferences.

The simple fix for this bug then, is to disable and remove all notification sound options from Thunderbird, on OS X 10.8 and above, and let Notification Center deal with it. For the majority of users, and according to Apple, that is the correct solution.

However, as Javi pointed out in bug 391674, Thunderbird's ability to play a user's sound file as a custom notification sound is a valuable feature for some people. Many Mac users have complained that Notification Center only offers one notification sound for everything.

If it's important to retain the custom notification sound feature, I would suggest changing the Thunderbird preferences UI from:

[x] Play a sound
    (o) System Alert Sound
    ( ) Use the following sound file:
        [_________________________________]

to something like:

[x] Play the following sound file: 
        [_________________________________]
Note: please uncheck "Play sound for notifications" in the System Preferences Notifications pane when choosing a custom sound file.


In other words, playing the default System Alert sound, or not, should be left to the Notifications system. Thunderbird should not try to play the default System Alert sound itself, or offer an option to turn it on or off, as it does now. That could lead to confusing situations like double alert sounds, or to an alert sound still being played even though the user has unchecked that option in either Notifications or Thunderbird preferences.

Playing a custom sound file would be a special case. Presumably a user who has gone through choosing a custom sound file in Thunderbird, and read the warning, could be expected to understand that unchecking "Play sound for notifications" in the system Notifications preferences does not disable it. There is still room for confusion, but it wouldn't apply to most users.

For everyone else, who does not enable and choose a custom sound file, Thunderbird would work like every other standard application.

This solution would depend on implementing my suggestion in bug 391674, to also remove the "Show an alert" checkbox from Thunderbird and set mail.biff.show_alert true on OS X 10.8+. That would ensure that users can control the notification sounds in the standard way, if they don't choose a custom sound.

Comment 8

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I like Sum Sung suggestions.

However Thunderbird must be compatible with OS X 10.6. That version didn't provide notifications settings (as far as I know). Also, I think we are currently avoiding to provide different GUI versions based on operating system versions. Comment 7 suggestion could be implemented in a ifdef when the version of OS X we are supporting as a minimum support Notification settings.

Furthermore, the customization of the sound played on the notification center settings didn't appear until OS X 10.10.

Comment 9

[Steve Chessin]

One issue with Comment 4 is that System Preferences -> Notifications doesn't let you customize the sound in 10.9, whereas Thunderbird -> Preferences -> General does. (In fact, you can choose one sound for mail and another for chats.) See bug 947776.

Comment 10

[Yury K]

Hello. Just wanted to confirm this issue. I have same 31.3.0 Thunderbird, Mac OS X 10.9.5 and the same problem. Also this problem started about 2 months ago, i.e. in previous version(s).

I did not see this thread, therefore first confirmed similar issue where subject is "Notifications in Thunderbird plays two sounds" (Bug 947776).

I think that the real issue is that Thunderbird does not play any custom sound when system notification sound is off (from os x settings). If we're using system for playing sounds, then this option should not be in Thunderbird. But it should be back-compatible as said above, plus this option gives great opportunity to customize it which 10.9 hasn't...

I really like Sum Sung's suggestion about having custom sound option which does not depend on system notifications. User can just chose whether to play a sound for new mail or not. Of course this becomes useless for Yosemite (if it has notification sounds customizations), but very useful for previous versions. Don't see any other ways except of checking OS X versions from the code which is not elegant and is avoided as mentioned above by Javi.

Thank you very much for helping solving this issue. Thunderbird is the best!

Comment 13

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Probably a WONTFIX.

Lately many bug-fixes in the area of integration with the notification center in macOS have landed. Some of them landed because TB deprecated versions of OS X not supporting the Notification Center -the one where user could enable or disable notification's sound-.

Right now Thunderbird will never play a sound by itself. At least when user hadn't selected a custom sound. When the default sound is the one user wanted to hear, then Thunderbird doesn't allow he/she to disable it. That must be done in System Preferences. So now there is a way to disable playing the sound, making this bug not fixable.

Comment 14

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away until July 8)]

Thx Javi! -> WONTFIX

Comment 15

[Traut]

WONTFIX is a very disappointing "Solution".

Here everything is disabled for Thunderbird - especially since alerts do appear for every new message, which is moved to the folder SN (Social Networks) for every (repeated) message from facebook - and although I told the THUNDERBIRD filter not to show any Mailbox Alert (which is done via Mailbox Alert extension)

Comment 16

[Traut]

Attachment: alert for social network (almost spam)

alert appears even if notifications are turned off

Comment 17

[Traut]

Attachment: disabled Notifications in MacOS 10.10

Comment 18

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Hello Traut.

> the THUNDERBIRD filter not to show any Mailbox Alert (which is done via
> Mailbox Alert extension)

This bug was closed. I suggest you try disabling your Mailbox Alert add-on and see if, with sound preferences disabled in Thunderbird, plays a sound.

If it plays it and it shouldn't and you tested it with Mailbox Alert add-on disabled, then we could reopen this bug.

That add-on wasn't updated for a long time: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mailbox-alert/versions/?page=1#version-0.17.0

And reading the changelog on that page looks like they have not done anything about the new alert behaviour in Thunderbird for macOS.

If it happens that the reason you are seen and listening the new mail alert, I suggest you open a new bug report in https://github.com/tjeb/Mailbox-Alert, which is the open-source repository for the extension. I have done a very quick view of it and it seems that the add-on is using its own code for all the functions that were provided for notifications on the Thunderbird code-base, not taking it into account the said behaviour for macOS users.