On Windows, Biff should be using the "New Mail Notification" sound event (if one's available for that event; if not, the system beep should be used). See the Sounds applet of the control panel.

Hi Blake, I just played the New Mail Notification sound from the ControlPanel (WinNT) and it sounds no different from the sound that we are getting from the beep function (that has been added as default). Let me know if you find it different. Thanks. bhuvan

Hey, Mine's a more pleasant sound, but that's because I've got Outlook Express installed (it uses that sound).

...Of course, this is not to say that I think we should be copying OE (although I wouldn't mind in this regard), but as a courtesy to users we should be playing the sound for new mail notification that they specify....

this bug is probably dependent on http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71356 to be fixed in order to check.

*adding self to cc* bug 71356 is fixed This one is important! On my windows box (and in fact, _any_ windows box I touch for more than an hour or two) I disable the system beep. It doesnt matter that it sounds annoying, because I can change it. what matters is that it plays in a wide variatey of inappropriate situations, for example, when I press the "down" arrow at the end of a multi-line text edit control. Biff needs to use the system "New Mail Notification" sound so that it will be possible for the user to enable that one specific, useful, meaningful beep without being forced to suffer the barrage of other beeps that windows inflicts on you when you have the default sound enabled.

Bhuvan, use the control panel and the sounds control. You'll see that the sounds are all configurable to many standard sounds and I think they're also configurable. Anyway, on your system the new mail sound and the system beep sound are probably the same due to the configuration in this control. Go into the control and change your new mail sound to tada.wav and then get some new mail. You'll hear the system beep. _That's_ what this bug is about. If we're honoring any system sound setting, it needs to be the right one. This should have a higher priority and get scheduled, nom nsbeta1.

Adding 4xp, I just tried this in 4.x and it honors the new mail sound.

marking nsbeta1-

adding to main biff tracking bug

adding myself to cc. hmm, i would like to select a sound in the mozilla prefs more than using system defaults (if i want to change the moz biff sound, why going to my win preferences? why not using the moz prefs?) but if you wanna use win prefs, new mail notification is much better than the system beep. or would there be a possibility to add a new sound event like "mozilla mail notification" and to use this one (like aol does it)? perhaps you could change that sound then via the moz pref or so... was just thinking about it..

Actually, there IS a working pref for that already, but nobody has added it to the prefs UI yet. For example, I manually added user_pref("mail.biff.default_sound_url", "file:///G|/mozilla/boing.wav"); to my prefs.js file, and it works. I think in a perfect world, the mail notification prefs should looks something like this in the GUI ( ) No sound ( ) Speaker Beep ( ) System Mail Notification Sound (*) Custom sound file [ G:\mozilla\boing.wav ]

mpt: A spot of UI design required here, I think (independent of whether we add "Windows system mail sound" to "None", "Speaker Beep" and "This Sound File 'Ere Guv". Gerv

Certainly, sir. On any OS which provides its own UI for mail notification (as Windows and Mac OS both do), Mozilla should respect that setting, and should not provide any duplicate UI itself. It's better to let the user choose a particular setting in one place (the OS control panel), and have it apply to all their programs, than to make them fart around changing the same setting in multiple programs. On any OS where Mozilla does not yet follow the OS setting for biff (or where such an OS setting does not yet exist), my suggested UI is given in my 2001-01-07 comment in bug 64462.

I vote for this bug. When my system plays a ding (system default sound) and I'm not touching the keyboard, I have to look through many windows to see which one (if any) was trying to get my attention. This problem is MUCH worse since I started using N6.

This bug overlaps with bug 64475 which made some progress (we could choose any sound file) until a regression happened (bug 99898) which results with the pathetic sound we now hear. And yes, I have to scan a lot of windows to check whether I received mail or a ssh session died :-(

*** Bug 105922 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This is the Windows part of bug 64475 (actually already fixed for Windows and Mac). Marking as a dup. If anyone disagrees, feel free to reopen *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 64475 ***

verified as dup.