How do I minimize Evolution to the system tray in Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

This plugin allows "closing" or minimizing Evolution to the mail indicator (tray) in a native way.

Actually, it simply minimizes Evolution and hides it from the pager to behave as “closed”,
the same as the other programs do. (Empathy, Gwibber, ...) To install it:

1. Download the last version of the plugin (for example, evolution-tray-0.0.8.tar.gz).
2. Once downloaded, open it and extract its contents.
3. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and cd to the plugin's folder.

4. Install its dependencies by executing:

   sudo apt-get install evolution-dev
   sudo apt-get install intltool
   

5. Run ./configure

6. If the above didn't give errors, run  make

7. Finally, install the plugin by running:

   sudo make install
   

Enjoy!

Solution 2:

Evolution-on Modified plugin works fine with the below steps.

I have tried AllTray, evolution-tray , Kdocker , original evolution-on (as per KostadinAtanasov repo on github) and mail-notification-evolution (which is used to send notification while evolution is closed); all of them have a problems with the new versions of evolution with me; most of them haven't been updated many of years ago.

I have found an evolution-on fork that has been updated to match the evolution 3.22 development which it seems remain valid up to my current evolution version 3.28.

Steps to build

Ubuntu version : 18.04
Desktop Environment : Gnome (Default ubuntu)

You may find other packages names and versions on other distributions.

1. Install development dependencies.

    sudo apt-get install -y libgconf2-dev intltool evolution-dev libecal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev evolution-plugins autoconf
   

2. Clone

    mkdir evolution_on && cd evolution_on
    git clone https://github.com/acidrain42/evolution-on.git .
   

3. Configure and install

    autoreconf -sivf
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
   

4. You can remove dependencies later.

    sudo apt-get remove -y libgconf2-dev intltool evolution-dev libecal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev
    sudo apt-get autoremove
   

EDIT

Works with ubuntu 20.04 (Kde plasma DE) with usage of libecal2.0-dev instead of libecal1.2-dev

Solution 3:

You can use AllTray or KDocker for this. Evolution doesn't currently have a built-in way to send itself to the tray. AllTray should be available via synaptic.

Solution 4:

The accepted answer did not work for me. It throws an error on step 6 and I do not know how to fix it. AllTray seems to have stopped development as well.

However, Minimize to Tray did work for me, Ubuntu 19.04 and Evolution 3.32.1. More info can be found on the github page.

Once I added the extension, I also ran the following to have it functional:

sudo apt install xdotool