You want to run Evolution as your email client, but you then notice it doesn’t have a ‘keep running, but minimized in the system tray, so it can keep checking for new email periodically without cluttering up my taskbar’ option.

The official line on this seems to be that this is an insane requirement and that to satisfy it would count as “abuse” of the perfect Gnome environment… but that’s just typical arrogant bluster from the Gnome and/or Evolution developers. However, because it’s the official line, there really is no native, built-in way to do this very simple deed.

Here’s one possible solution, however, which I found met my requirements without necessitating that I take a degree in advanced physics to make it happen.

• Download AllTray
• Right-click the tarball and extract
• As root, go the the alltray-0.70 directory and issue three commands, in sequence:
• ./configure
• make
• make install
• Alter the launcher for Evolution (on the top panel, for example) so that instead of just triggering the command “evolution” it now triggers the command “alltray evolution”.

When you now launch Evolution with that quicklaunch icon, the program will immediately minimize itself to the system tray. An envelope icon will appear there. Click it once to make Evolution appear full-screen, once more to re-minimize (or, click close). To genuinely close the program, right-click the envelope icon and click Exit. Evolution will momentarily appear full-screen before closing itself.