MacBiff: Powerful polling for IMAP accounts
MacBiff is a “biff” program that sits in the menubar and polls multiple IMAP accounts for new mail.
Unlike many notification utilities, though, it takes full advantage of the functions and flexibility of IMAP servers and folders.
If you are looking for a powerful and flexible mail-check utility for your IMAP accounts that also works with Growl, you will want to read the rest of the review and see the screenshots after the jump.
When you run it for the first time, you will need to enter the information for your IMAP accounts. It then starts polling, displaying the results as nested folders on your IMAP server (excuse me sending myself email for this example, but it’s the weekend so email traffic is down):
As you can see, it displays the total number of emails in each folder as well as the unread ones. It retrieves a time stamp, sender and subject of the email for you.
Sadly, clicking the subject line info doesn’t open up the email in Mail.app. It should.
But there’s more! Under the hood, MacBiff offers options for subscribing, ignoring and disabling particular folders in each account:
It also interacts with Growl 
for yet more notification options, passing limited folder information to Growl as well for display in its alerts.
Finally, a nifty additional feature becomes available if you “detach” it from the menubar. MacBiff gives you a list of all your IMAP folders, the total number of emails in each one and the number of unread emails (although you can already get something like this in Mail.app with a keystroke):
MacBiff is an open source project. You can get the latest build from the developer’s web site.
Tags: biff, folders, growl, imap, menubar, nested folders, notification, open source, polling, subscribed foldersRelated posts
August 3rd, 2006 at 3:33 am
MacBiff is exactly what I want - something that checks my mail from the server without me having to have mail.app open.
But I can’t freaking get it to work!
I get “Err: (1) Operation Not Permitted” upon trying to check, and there’s no documentation of error messages online for me to look at.
I’m trying to check my school e-mail from home, so you might tell me to first try connecting to my school’s VPN … but I can check my school mail in mail.app without the VPN connection fine.
Was wondering if you could help me out?
August 3rd, 2006 at 7:12 am
Hi Kelly. Unfortuntately I am not very technially-minded, so taking advice from me is only likley to make the problem worse!
But I’ve dropped the developer an email. Perhaps he will be able to help.
August 6th, 2006 at 2:44 am
Hi there, Kelly. I’m sorry to hear that you’re having troubles with MacBiff. If you would send me an email, perhaps we can figure out what is going wrong.
The first thing that I would ask you to do is to run MacBiff from the Terminal. If MacBiff is installed in /Applications, you would just need to do the following:
Open Terminal.app from /Applications/Utilities
Type the following command:
/Applications/MacBiff.app/Contents/MacOS/MacBiffMacBiff should then run, and will probably produce some text in the Terminal. Once you get the error like you stated before, quit MacBiff, and copy the text from the Terminal
Send that copied text to me at bmoore@forkit.org
Hopefully we can get this figured out pretty quick.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:16 am
To Kelly:
This is more a usability-problem than a bug: the user has to know, that when using ssl, you have to use the portnumber 993 instead. Kelly was using SSL but left the default portnumber.
I had the very same problem and Branden was very helpful with above tipp. Thanks Branden!