I am on Ubuntu 12.04 using Thunderbird as email client. Both are up to date in terms of updates. I have bunch of nightly jobs that do the work and send a status mail. It gets tedious if you keep getting same/similar mails every day so I ended up writing a mail filter rule which causes emails to end up in their respective folders automatically. If things are going ok, I really don't need to read emails. Failure emails are sent to different alias - if the job runs. We recently discovered that one of the job had not run for few days as someone accidentally disabled it. In order to avoid such problems in future, I would like to setup thunderbird in such a way that if I don't get email from given address within given duration, it should alert me. My dream solution is to set up frequency - some jobs do run every 4 hours. Is this possible? Can I setup Thunderbird (preferred) or other email client for reminding me when expected email does not show up. Based on comments and answer I received, here are the reasons why I would like to use Thunderbird. We are already using Thunderbird. It has calender support via plugin, so I suppose someone is already watching time to remind us about the event. May be this another type of event. Additional job is one more failure point, may complicate life if it has to monitor multiple hosts. Additional tools - same thing, one more failure point. Thunderbird can be run across all the platforms we are using - Windows and Ubuntu. It sort of becomes platform independent solution.