Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

jedimasterkyle

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 27, 2014
607
914
Idaho
I'm curious to know if anyone knows of or is aware of a third party app whose sole existence is to better manage notifications for Mac? I'll explain...

Last week, I posted in here about how I was getting zero notifications from my Mac about new mail arriving and didn't receive any responses. So I spoke with 3 levels of tech support at Apple and by the time I got to the third engineer, they were just as stumped as I was. In short, I sometimes get new mail notifications but they are super inconsistent and the Apple rep I was speaking to on the phone couldn't make heads or tails of it. After 1-1/2 hours of troubleshooting, the only thing they could come up with was to do a fresh and clean install of Sonoma and HOPE that fixes it but they didn't have any assurance that it would.

So instead of waiting for Apple to hear from more people about this issue or wait for them to maybe release a fix, I started wondering if there is a third party app that does a much better job of managing and controlling notifications on Mac? Let's face it, the notification system in Sonoma is kind of a mess and hasn't received the TLC that it probably should with this latest release. But I just wonder if there is a developer out there who said "I'm going to attempt to fix this" and release an app that does a better job of refining and managing notifications.
 
Interesting... I just upgraded to Sonoma 14.3.1, and all of a sudden my "normal" Thunderbird notification sound became an obnoxious, loud sound that I can't stand. I went into Thunderbird sound settings and discover that the incoming mail "play the following sound file" box is greyed out. It seems like Sonoma wants to do it's own thing... I've tried going into my Mac's system settings, and under "sound," I can choose various alert sounds, but none do anything to change the Thunderbird notification sound. I called AppleCare, and they don't seem to know anything about it yet. I guess more folks need to bring Sonoma notification issues to their attention asap...
 
A third party notification app is not possible, it would require each app to be updated, like it worked with Growl years ago. Anyway, missing notifications is usually because Mail doesn't send notifications, not because the notification manager doesn't display them.

@jakebooz an app can decide which sound to play when displaying a notification. So it's up to Thunderbird to expose that option. However, you can disable the notification sound in System Setting
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.