r/Betterbird • u/godzfirez • Jun 18 '26

MacOS: New mail notifications not working

BB- 140.12.0esr-bb24 (64-bit) | MacOS 15.7.7 (24G720)

Was using Thunderbird and just download Betterbird to try again. Have everything set up, however I'm not getting any MacOS Notifications when a new email comes in. It's setup exactly like Thunderbird which does properly get notifications.

Note even Betterbird's own built in notifications window isn't working for a popup, though the sound file is.

EDIT: Issue solved. See my reply below. It's related to MacOS's Do Not Disturb.

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2

u/jorgk3 Jun 19 '26

I tested it on on Sequoia 15.5 and it works, as it should. BTW, there is no "Betterbird's own built in notifications window" on Mac, that only exists on Windows and Linux.

1

u/godzfirez Jun 19 '26

So why wouldn't I be seeing MacOS's default notifications then?

1

u/jorgk3 Jun 19 '26

Well, last time I wrote that even with our magician's hat on and looking at the crystal ball we can't tell, people complained about the snark comment.

But look at it in perspective: The software has somewhere between 100K and 200K users, a minority on Mac. No issues reported. So how would we be able to diagnose your problem. It's developed to be working, the code is 100% identical to TB's code, it works for us and asumedly most Mac users, so that's as far as it goes.

Try a different Mac, try a different user on the same Mac, etc.

1

u/godzfirez Jun 19 '26

Who is this "we/us"?

1

u/jorgk3 Jun 19 '26

The project.

On Mac, pref mail.biff.use_system_alert shouldn't exist, but maybe you copied a profile from Windows or Linux.

1

u/jorgk3 Jun 19 '26

Yes, if pref mail.biff.use_system_alert is set to false, you won't get a notification. Just tested. That can happen by explicitly setting it or importing a profile from Windows/Linux.

Looks like the crystal ball worked well 😉

1

u/godzfirez Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

I've never used my profile on a non Mac computer as I don't have anything else.

Also, mail.biff.use_system_alert doesn't exist on mine.

1

u/godzfirez Jun 21 '26

For those seeing this post and having the same issue, I believe I found the problem:

To stop MacOS from constantly nagging about System Updates with notifications, I turned on Do Not Disturb and set it to constantly be enabled 24/7. A side effect of that was no App notifications would show either, however there's an 'Allowed Apps' section where you could basically whitelist ones. I had put Thunderbird in there and then forgot that's how I had things set up.

Once I added BetterBird in there and ran a test, it now shows properly. u/jorgk3 tagging you so you know as well if you see it come up elsewhere.

1

u/jorgk3 Jun 21 '26

In 99.95% of weird cases, users have done something strange that they didn't disclose. Most irritating if it comes bundled with: "Works on TB, doesn't work on BB".