Thunderbird actually does turn the icon blue already, but not for all
messages. The reason for this is people complained to me in Oneiric that
the icon was being turned blue far too much. In fact, for some people
(including me), the icon was blue pretty much permanently as long as
Thunderbird was open, and this reduces the usefulness of the messaging
indicator for notification of real-time messages to pretty much zero. In
fact, people just got so fed up of it that they were asking me how to
disable this feature in Thunderbird entirely.

I did consider making Thunderbird never turn the icon blue, but made a
compromise which turns the icon blue in the following circumstances:

- The message is sent with high-priority OR
- The message is flagged (by a filter) OR
- The message is addressed directly to the recipient (eg, not CC) AND the 
message is not low prioirty AND the message wasn't automated AND the message is 
not from a mailing list

Some real life examples of how this works:
- If your boss sends you a message, it will turn blue
- It will not turn blue for normal mailing list traffic
- If someone replies to a message you sent to a mailing list, it will turn blue
- If Amazon sends you a marketing message which isn't marked as spam, it will 
not turn blue
- It will not turn blue for bug mail traffic (unless you have set up filters to 
flag messages you are particularly interested in, eg, bugs with high importance 
or bugs you are assigned to)
- If Facebook emails you with a friend request, it will not turn blue.

It has been like this for pretty much the whole 12.04 cycle, and so far
people have been much quieter about it (ok, it could be that they got so
sick of the icon turning blue in Oneiric that they just disabled the
feature entirely and are no longer using it). I think the current
implementation works quite well though, and I'd prefer suggestions to
improve it rather than just turning the icon blue for all messages.

Remember, we also show a count on the launcher, which is displayed all
the time by default in Precise.

And, if you want the icon to turn blue for all messages, we have an
about:config pref for that. But you'll soon realise how annoying that is
if you get more than a dozen or so mails per hour.

The current implementation is more like Gwibber, which keeps counts of
messages in the messaging menu without turning it blue. IMO we should
only really turn the icon blue if we think that the message is important
enough to interrupt your current workflow. Most e-mail does not fall in
to this category.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/957922

Title:
  Indicator-Messages should turn blue when new emails land in
  Thunderbird

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