Modern e-mail notification

[chrysrobyn]

My e-mail knowledge is still stuck in a mid-'90s mentality. I miss the days of xbiff and being told when I have mail as opposed to my client having to ask (and very likely missing Thunderbird's beep). On principle, the reduction of traffic and server load appeals. In college, I had Exceed running on my NT box and the mail server ran XBiff so when mail came in, I was informed immediately. My roommate found a hack to emulate the function on his Performa (a 636 I think) -- a small script and an entry (a tee if I recall) in the .forward file in his Unix home directory and each mail delivery would trigger a little icon near the clock in the upper right of the screen at the same time it was stored on the server.

Is there MacOSX functionality that does something similar? A program to sit on the client and listen for e-mail servers receiving e-mail, accompanied by a program to sit on the server only to be executed on e-mail arrival? Now that I'm more seasoned with procmail recipes, I could be notified only when the inbox is hit with e-mail below a certain spamassassin score and cut way down on mental interrupts.

I'd be tempted to run xbiff on my e-mail host with the X connection tunneled over the ssh, but 1) it would be the only reason to run X (seems a waste) and 2) Dreamhost disapproves of persistent processes (maybe xbiff wouldn't count?).

 

[MisterMe]

There are mail notification utilities, however, I don't see the point. If you launch Mail and leave let it run, then its Dock icon will display the number of unopened messages. Mail will also beep whenever it receives a new non-spam message.

 

[chrysrobyn]

There are mail notification utilities, however, I don't see the point. If you launch Mail and leave let it run, then its Dock icon will display the number of unopened messages. Mail will also beep whenever it receives a new non-spam message.

Fair enough. The point is that 1) Mail isn't good enough. The reasons why are their own thread, but please accept that it isn't good enough for me. 2) I hide my dock, so anything that changes there isn't good enough. 3) Beeping doesn't always get my attention, I want a permanent status change (like an icon next to the clock) that I can see at an instant and doesn't take up additional real estate. 4) Pinging the mail cluster every 5 minutes (or keeping the connection open all the time like most IMAP clients do, but only asking for status changes every 5-15 minutes) is inherently less pleasing than having the mail cluster fire off a single process to notify me of mail that matters. Not that this part is a deal buster, but it is what it is.

 

[MisterMe]

This is the best that I can do for you.

 

[chrysrobyn]

This is the best that I can do for you.

Dockstar looks like a cool addon for Mail that would accomplish a lot of what I need. My only caveat is that I'd need Mail to run in parallel with Thunderbird. Thanks for the tip.