Mail Unread Menu: Menubar notification
Mail Unread Menu is a new Menubar notification utility for Mail.app from Logan Design (which also makes a menubar notification utility for NetNewsWire 
).
The name will sound familiar. It is remarkably close to an old favourite, MailUnreadStatusBar, and the application is very similar too.
It sits in your Menubar and polls for unread messages at a user-definable period. When it finds some, the number of emails is displayed next to its icon. Menubar utilities like this are less distracting than the notification provided by Growl or Mail.Appetizer.
The drop-down menu offers you options for immediate mail-checking, access to the preferences and the app’s readme file:
Mail Unread Menu has only just been released, so it doesn’t have a swag of features. The Preferences pane mainly offers a place to set the time period for polling Mail.app:
It doesn’t have any of the account-specific features of MaulUnreadStatusBar, which allows you to specify which mailboxes to keep an eye on. Perhaps the developer will add these things later.
Mail Unread Menu only works if Mail.app is running.
It’s a universal binary, freeware (donations not refused) and available from the developer’s web site .
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June 25th, 2006 at 12:08 am
I used to use lots of notification:
- Mail.appetizer
- DockStar with per-account flags
- custom per-account sounds
and you know what I realized? That I worked much better if I instead did the following:
- used DockStar to turn OFF all unread-count flags
- every hour on the hour, triggered a script that brought up Mail.app.
I could then read through the past hour’s mail, all at one time.
I’ve found this has really helped my concentration.
June 25th, 2006 at 12:12 am
Admirable restraint! I had never thought of using DockStar that way.
September 11th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
[...] Logan Rockmore has updated his Mail Unread Menu app, a menubar utility that offers discreet notifications for your Mail.app messages. [...]
September 18th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
[...] Mail Unread Menu (discreet menubar notification for Mail.app) was added to the Notification section. [...]
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:41 am
[...] I have always wanted to see the number of unread mail messages I have in the menu bar. Finally, there is one. HawkWings wrote this article on a menubar application that displays your unread mail messages in your menu bar. [...]