A bouncing Dock icon (or not)
So many notification options exist for Apple Mail — “loud” ones like iAlert or MailAppetizer, discreet ones like MailUnreadStatusBar, spoken ones like the Announce Mail or Spoken Sender Applescripts — that it is possible to overlook Mail’s built-in notification features.
Mail.app can announce new mail with an audio file that you can configure yourself in the General tab of the Preferences pane.
It can also let you know that new mail has arrived by bouncing its icon in the Dock. You can easily activate this by setting up this rule:
Apple Mail doesn’t have a rule condition called “Message is not Junk” that would prevent the icon bouncing for Junk. If you know how to do this in a smarter way, let me know.
If the sight of anything at all bouncing in the Dock annoys you, you can disable attention-seeking icon bouncing permanently with Insanity’s free Dock Detox 
haxie, which requires Insanity’s APE to run.
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November 29th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
In order to only bounce the dock item for the important stuff, I have set the rule to include:
if any:
sender is in address book
sender is previous recipient
then bounce dock icon.
I figure everything else can wait 5 minutes or so for me to notice!
November 29th, 2005 at 10:14 pm
Good idea. That’s clever.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Though Mail.app doesn’t have a rule condition called “Message is not Junkâ€, it has a “Message is Junk” condition and a “stop evaluating rules” action. Just place a “Junk” rule just before your “Bouncing Icon” rule.