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.

Erik Hinterbichler has created a plugin, inspired by the well-loved MailAppetizer, that offers the same polished notifications when new mail arrives, and adds the option to perform some quick actions from the notification pane itself.

As an added bonus it’s ready to run in Snow Leopard now, while MailAppetizer is still being made Snow Leopard friendly.

It offers a customisable notification pane, with four icons on the bottom which allow you to delete, reply, open the message in amil.app or simply mark it read:

Herald comes in an installer package, but installs itself as standard plugin bundle in the Bundles folder of your Mail folder. It adds an additional pane to Mail’s Preferences.

The first tab allows you to specify whether the notification pane should be permanent or dismiss itself after a user-defined number of seconds. It also offers the option of opening the message in Mail’s main window or in a separate window of its own.

The second tab control the background and font colours and the level of transparency in the notification:

The third pane provides the ability to specify which mailboxes it polls for incoming emails, providing you with good control over just how bothered you want to be, and by what kind of emails:

If you like having your email in your face all the time, a utility like this will do the job very well.

Herald is donation-ware and is available from Erik’s web site . notification, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, mailappetizer, productivity

MailFX is a new notification utility for Mail.app that displays a Quartz Composer animated graphic on the Desktop when new mail arrives.

This is the sort of thing that will please people looking for a notification utility between the complete pop-up MailAppetizer offers and the minimal approach of menubar utilities like MailUnreadStatusBar.

It installs itself as a classic bundle in your Mail Directory, with its own preference Pane in Mail.app’s Preferences:

Here you can select which of the included graphics you want it to display, how long it should display and how transparently. It can also play a sound when the notification is shown (Nostalgic readers should check out the Eudora new mail sound in the dropdown box).

You can also opt to reveal Mail.app when you click on the notification.

The plugin crates a rule that controls which emails will trigger a notification. By default it is set to trigger for all new mail:

Obviously, tweaking the rule can reduce this and make the alerts more useful (for example, set the rule to trigger only on emails from your work account and not emails from your blog, or only from your boss, or whatever).

In addition, it claims to restore the ability to hide Mail.app on start-up, a feature broken in Leopard (and Tiger too, IIRC).

MailFX is freeware and only works with Leopard Mail. It’s available from the developer’s web site

Excursus: An Ethical Blogging Dilemma

Every now and then an app or plugin comes along that sharpens the difference between being a journalist and a blogger. The bouncy, bouncy notification madness of NotifX was just such an app. This one is another.

When you are a journalist, you just write what your editor tells you to, and don’t ask (too many) questions. And then you get a paycheck in the mail.

When you’re a blogger, it’s more complicated (for one thing, there are no paychecks).

On the one hand, you want to be comprehensive. That’s the point of the blog. On the other hand, there’s the question of good taste. The blog is “mine” in a way that the IT articles I once wrote are not. To be honest, this utility offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon than use it.

To post or not to post?

I resolve this dilemma as follows: Smack myself on the back of the head for being a snob, and post. notification, mail.app, apple mail, quartz composer, animation, anti-productivity applications, notifX, plugins, a question of good taste

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

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 .mail.app, apple mail, notification, dock, badges, roll your own, tips, plugins