Desktop Mail notification with GeekTool
Sunday, March 25th, 2007
Hannes Bretschneider has written a script 
that displays notifications about newly arrived mail on the Desktop using the GeekTool utilty.
GeekTool is a Preference Pane utility that can pipe the result of Unix commands, scripts and other things onto the Desktop. There are many ways to use it. For example, Lifehacker journo Gina Trapani uses it to pipe her plain text to-do files onto her Desktop.
Hannes’ script grabs the sender and subject line of new messages. When a GeekTool entry is created for it:
It outputs the results to the Desktop:
Like all GeekTool outputs, the font face, point size, position on the Desktop and many other options can be set in the GeekTool Preference Pane.
This elegant notification solution runs in the background and avoids the need to use another notification utility.
On the other hand, in order to get the most of out it, you need to be able to see your Desktop. I can’t remember when I last saw mine.
Tags: Apple Mail, geektool, mail.app, new mail, notification, plugin, Script
Logan Rockmore’s excellent menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated and now offers much more control for users over the mailboxes it will track.
Mac OS X Tips UK 
The menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated.
The latest update to Mail Unread Menu has a changed application icon and will now correctly set Mail.app to work with bundles if these settings are not already enabled.
The third-party Menubar utility for Google’s news reader, 
MailUnreadStatusBar, a discreet Menubar notification utility for Mail.app, has been released as a universal binary, which will run just as smoothly on Intel Macs as well as PPC ones.
Its drop-down menu offers options to open, show or quit Mail and to perform an instant check for new mail.
