Ambient or layered notification in Mail.app
Adam Rice has posted 
a long, detailed and creative account of how he structures his notifications in Mail.app.
Through a careful combination of Address Book Groups and Mail rules, he has established at least three differing levels of notification.
Emails from friends are announced with a spoken alert, using one of the several applescripts around that can do that.
Emails from clients are distinguished by a special “Work” chime and a Growl alert.
Emails from people he hasn’t corresponded with before are shunted to a ‘holding pen’, one step away from the Junk folder.
It’s a clever system that could easily be modified to your own needs and correspondence patterns. As a meticulous documenter of these things, I thought it deserved recording :)
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, applescript, email, growl, mail.app, notification
May 4th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
I’m still holding out for a program that provides mail notification that doesn’t require Mail.app to be running at all times.
I want it to interact directly with the POP3 server, view header information and able to delete messages without having to download them first.
There are a few old, unsupported apps that do something kind of like this but nothing like the Windows app called PopTray (www.poptray.org).
This has been the one thing that I haven’t found since I switched a couple of months ago.
Anyone have any ideas or interested in working with me on building one?
May 5th, 2006 at 3:11 am
Even though I know POP is still popular, most hardcore developers outgrow it — I would look for your program to interact with IMAP over a POP3 protocal.
I’ll have to check this out — I use growl for just about everything now — I used to use mail.appetizer, but growls ‘music video’ has me hooked.