Mail Badger offers users the ability to set more than one new mail badge on Mail.app’s Dock icon.

It is cheaper and more flexible than DockStar, although the eye-candy is not quite as well developed.

Mail Badger installs itself as a bundle in your ~/Mail/Bundles folder. (Uninstalling it again is as easy as deleting the Mail Badger.mailbundle file from that folder.)

Once installed, new badges are created in Mail Badger’s preference pane within Mail’s Preferences:

Options are provided for the shape of the new badge (spiky or smooth circle, star or heart, or you can add your own images), its size and colour and for the size of the text on each badge. You can also choose where to place it on Mail’s Stamp icon.

The count for each new badge is controlled by the user-customizable rules that operate very much like the Mail’s native rules. Here is the combination that gives me instant notice of the new mail from my wife in a pink love heart:

Beautiful!

New mail from my boss also strikes my eye at once with a black star badge:

You can probably think of even better uses for the extra mail badges in your own context.

You can also use Mail Badger as an easy way of changing the existing single “spiky circle” mail badge, giving it a different shape, size or colour.

Mail Badger is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .