I subscribed to several mailing list and I get many emails every day, most of them being automatically transfered to the corresponding mailbox, but I wanted to be specifically warned for incoming personal email. Here is how to make Mail.app (in Jaguar) play a different sound for your different email accounts and/or to play a sound only for emails that are not automatically transfered to another mailbox.
Say you have two different email accounts (personal@mac.com and work@mac.com) and that you subscribed to a mailing list (myMailingList).
- In the Preferences of Mail.app, set "New mail sound" to None (otherwise, you'll get several sounds played)
- Say you already have a rule to automatically transfer emails from the mailing list to a mailbox called "MailingMails". The rule is something like "If Subject contains [myMailingList], perform Transfer message to mailbox MailingMails (it depends on how the mailing server formats the Subject header. Adapt this rule to your own header structure)
- Click on the Plus button in "Perfom the following actions" section and select "Play sound" and the sound you want to be played, most likely a quite discrete one. Validate the changes.
- Create a new rule which will serve as a default rule.
- Set the new rule to "If To contains personal@mac.com, perform Play sound" and select the sound you wish.
- Repeat steps 4-5 to create another rule for your work@mac.com email address ans set another sound if you wish.
- In the Rules list, you must reorganise the order of the rules so that your mailing list emails will be transfered from inbox before the default rules apply.

