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.

MacWorld seems to be heaving with articles of interest to Mail.app users today.

Kelly Turner kicks things off with a confession about her bulging inbox, its 35,000 emails and the level of self-deception involved in telling herself that her system was working:

…I often lost track of messages that still needed to be dealt with. As new messages arrived and older ones disappeared from my screen, I seldom thought to scroll down to see what was still unread. And although I’d developed elaborate coping mechanisms (using colors and flags and searches to identify messages) simply having an ocean of e-mail in front of me made the process of answering and checking e-mail seem like a Herculean task.

This forms a nice segue to the first part of Joe Kissel’s three-part “email renovation” series. He begins with a series of tips on reducing the amount of traffic that comes into your inbox in the first place—dealing with spam, all those hilarious joke-a-minute emails that your friends and family insist on circulating, learning what belongs in Mail.app and what belongs in iChat and more.

Part Two is on “Meet your new filing system”. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t mention Mail Act-on and MailTags , the two premier organisational plugins for Mail.app.

If you can’t wait for Joe’s next installment you can browse through past posts of mine (one, two, three) on getting things done with Mail Act-on and MailTags. Or read them now and see how much better Joe’s tips are when he posts them!

Joe also takes the chance to put up some links to articles he wrote in February 2007 on “clearing away the clutter” in your inbox. Anything by Joe is worth the time spent reading it. These are no exception.

Finally, Joe has written a piece on coming to grips with notes and to-dos in Leopard Mail. He offers some smart tips on moving your calenders and to-dos to an IMAP account. However, be sure to read the comments as well and see what problems people are having with getting iCal to behave.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, ical, getting things done, gtd, inbox zero, email, life balance

The opportunity has come up, due to a miraculous absence of work, church or wider family commitments, to make a break for the beach house. We’re taking it.

I’ll be back in just over a week.

I hope that Hawk Wings readers have a happy, relaxing and joyful Easter. I know that I will:

mail.app, apple mail, inbox zero, bwahahahaha!, productivity, easter, beach, personal

Many people will tell you that a mother-in-law is nothing but trouble.

But it’s not true.

Last night my mother-in-law sent me an engaging picture that is just begging to be included in a productivity photo caption competition:

Perhaps, “A first look at Vista”? Or “Worker gets the wrong end of the ‘Inbox Zero’ concept“?

This kind of humour might appeal more to British readers, but I’m open to better offers from any quarter.productivity, not apple mail, laptop, vista, install, inbox zero, caption

Derek Jones has written a long and most excellent post on how to whip your Mail.app into shape as a lean, mean machine for getting jobs done with efficiency and speed.

His Mail.app was failing the pinch test. One day he suddenly noticed that he had 9,000 emails in his inbox and he didn’t really know why.

He did know how he wanted it to be though:

I desperately needed to finally write some Rules, use some Smart Mailboxes, or something. I wanted my inbox to be empty when I had read and either filed or deleted the Offending Intrusion. I wanted to assign importance or tag an email in some way that would help me organize where I spent my attention instead of feeling like I needed to act immediately on an email as soon as I read it. While I’m at it, why not finally switch to IMAP so I can sync my email between my G5 and Macbook? Every other aspect of my computing is built around synchronicity, why is my email left out?

He walks readers through his new fitness regime: how to archive old emails in an organised way, how to switch to IMAP so that all your email is available and synchronised between multiple Macs, and how to develop a “tag-and-go” system for email using Mail Act-on and MailTags (why not can compare his system to the way I do it, then work from them both to make a system that matches your needs?).

I love posts like this because they offer the opportunity to measure your own system against something more objective, a system that works for someone else. You always learn something new. It’s long, but it’s worth it, and it will put some muscle into your Mail.app.

[Thanks, Leslie]mail.app, apple mail, GTD, getting things done, plugins, productivity, tips, inbox zero