Widgets are breeding faster than rabbits. Mail notification seems to be a popular function for them and many now exist. Here’s my take on the best of the offerings.

GMail users are the best served. At least five widgets are able to poll your account from the Dashboard. I think the best of them is GPeek, which has a good blend of flexibility and design in its interface. It can tell you a lot about the mail waiting for you, like this:

At a glance you can see senders and titles and decide what’s worth checking out more closely. But it also has a minimalist mode, which restricts itself to the number of waiting emails:

MailPop is another good one, although it is too “fussy” for me. And the others are Gmail Inbox, Gmail checker (cute!) and gotGMail.

Other types of mail accounts can be polled with eCheck (which costs money), MailPop (does Gmail, promises .Mac support soon), iMail, Mail Widget and Pop.

Yahoo account holders can use the My Yahoo! widget.

More quirky are the notification widgets, flores and ottmar, produced by Stephan.com, which add a flower to a virtual vase for each unread mail waiting for you.

Users are spoilt for choice, but I can’t help wondering, what’s the point? Why poll your mail via a widget? Mail Appetizer and MailUnreadStatusBar offer excellent polling options without needing to go to the Dashboard. Or you could just look at your inbox in Mail.app. Widgets are fun, sure. But for this purpose, I just don’t get it.

Similar Posts:

• Google’s Gmail widget
• SwiftMail: Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL from the Dashboard
• Slim down your Gmail Inbox
• MailWidget 1.2.0: Dashboard mail-check and notification for Mail.app
• Mail Widget 1.3

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 6th September, 2005 at 12:19 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.