Speaking of notification utilities, Stefan Schüßler is actively at work updating his popular (and beautiful) mail.appetizer plugin for mail.app.

The most recent development build (150) works with 10.6.4. You can download it from his development snapshot page where you will also find instructions for installing it.

For those not in the know, mail.appetizer makes beautiful notification previews of incoming email, with options to handle the email at the bottom of the preview window:

You can follow Stefan’s progress in releasing new development builds on twitter .

The email notification utility Notify has just been updated.

The new release comes with a slew of new features, including keyboard shortcuts, the ability to grab photos from Address Book for its Growl notifications, smarter options for message reading and handling and better support for plain text.

Notify is at the feature-rich “high end” of the spectrum for email notifiers. Like MailCue , it is almost a mini-email client in itself.

It offers built-in support for Gmail and Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace and “ordinary” IMAP accounts:

The interface is minimal and well-crafted, offering options to read, delete or move messages in the menubar drop-down pane:

Buttons across the top recheck the account, launch the message in the webmail client or offer a full preview in Notify.

This new release (2.1.3) adds support for keyboard shortcuts but they are not — as far as I could see — documented. This leads to much fun with guessing and trial and error.

Preferences allow the user to set defaults for frequency of checking and message handling:

It also integrates with Growl, which does the heavy lifting for the notifications themselves.

The notifications comes in the style of Growl’s “smoky glass” Bezel.

Some people swear by the productivity and focus gains of using notifiers rather than email clients to monitor email traffic.

I am not entirely convinced. I remain a great fan of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach (he’s writing a book! ), with its stress on reducing the intrusiveness of email checks in your work. In my experience, he is right that,

“always on” email checkers have a tendency not only to blow a lot of unnecessary time and attention on scanning the horizon, but that the quality of their resulting email work often suffers.”

Still, if you have a cast-iron will and you’re looking for a notification utility, this one is nice.

Notify is shareware and is available from the developer’s web site . It normally costs USD 10, but is currently on sale for 30% less.

Of course, mail.appetizer also creates lovely notifications and is now (in beta form) compatible with 10.6.4. And it’s donationware.

Most mail.app users will have noticed that OS updates can break their plugins and third-party bundles.

This happens because Apple now changes the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) of Mail with every update, and requires plugins to match the new UUID each time in order to function. Thankfully, most developers are on the ball and provide updated versions of their plugins in good time.

GrowlMail, a notification plugin for mail.app that uses the Growl framework, fell prey to this problem after the 10.6.4 update.

If yours is broken, you can download a patched version of the plugin from the developer’s web site.

He also provides new plugin compatibility UUIDs that may bring other disabled bundles back to life.

Further help for other disabled plugins (like DockStar) is available in a macOSXHints tip .

UPDATE: 5 July 2010 A new version (1.2.2) of GrowlMail has been released, which is compatible with 10.6.4.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, growlmail, growl, notification

Growl 1.1.3 has been released, bringing with it the official Leopard-friendly GrowlMail Extra.

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember that a beta-version of the GrowlMail Extra emerged on the Internet late last year. This new release is the real thing.

The main Growl app gains a number of improvements, including the ability to show notifications in every one of Leopard’s Spaces, the option to set a unique sound for each app’s alerts, and some bug fixes.

GrowlMail itself has been rewritten to remove the conflict with Leopard, and can now be installed on other start-up volumes.

Likewise, GrowlSafari now works with Safari 3.0, and other Extras get bugfixes and enhanced compatibility with Leopard.

The alerts looks nice, and now seems to drag a picture from Address Book for the sender if one is available, but uses the default Mail stamp icon if not.

This screenshot features an “iPhonesque” display style from MacThemes.

GrowlMail adds a preference pane to Mail.app in which you can set the way it reports alerts for more than one new email, the mailboxes it should monitor and more:

Growl and its Extras are freeware and available from the Growl web site . growl, growlmail, mail.app, apple mail, notification, leopard, safari

Eagle-eyed Hawk Wings reader Dave Foshee emails to say that he has spotted a Leopard-friendly beta version of GrowlMail.

He found the link in a post on the Google Groups Discussion list for Growl.

The poster is offering it as a beta and asking for feedback on how well it works.

It works very well for me, so I encourage you to give it a go yourself, especially if you are looking for a slick, visual notification summary of your email.

Of course, you will need to install Growl first.

[Thanks, Dave!]apple mail, leopard mail, mail.app, growl, growlmail, leopard, notification, plugins

GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.mail.app, apple mail, growl, notification, tips, applescript, rules

Some time ago, while I wasn’t watching, Thomas Aylott updated his clever scripts which make iCal able to pipe its alarms through to Growl.

Previously, when Hawk Wings last blogged it, the process of activating the scripts was rather difficult and involved a lot of digging around in iCal’s guts.

Now Thomas has packaged up the scripts in a disk image along with step-by-step instructions on how to install them:

Four steps and you are done. Then you can enjoy Growl’s alerts instead of the iCal’s big scary messages with the jangly alarm clock.

The disk image is available on Thomas’s web site.ical, growl, notifications, scripts, hacks, tips