Jul 27, '04 10:06:00AM • Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 8 out of 10]
- Developer: Bronson Beta / Product page
- Price: Freeware
Mail.appetizer is a plug-in for Apple's Mail that provides a much more informative "new mail" preview than the standard "red number in the dock icon." With Mail.appetizer installed, you'll instead see a semi-transparent pop-up displaying the message sender, subject, mailbox, and a bit of the content of the message, along with a count of new messages. If you click in the window, you'll see the next new message, or (if there are no more) close the window. If you control-click the window, the current message is read; shift-control-clicking deletes the message. If you click on the subject, you'll open the email in Mail. Finally, you can dismiss all notifications by clicking the close widget, or dismiss the notifications for the current box only by control-clicking the close widget.
Mail.appetizer installs with a double-click, and works directly from Mail. It adds a new Mail preference (Notification), through which you control its behavior. You can specify a font family and size, degree of transparency, whether or not to show the header titles and mailbox name, and if you'd like it to automatically advance to the next message after a certain amount of time. About the only thing you can't do is pick which mailboxes are subject to Mail.appetizer's pop-ups, although that's promised for the next release. It does, however, run after all of your rules have been processed, and it skips the Junk mail folder (whew!).
If you ever get sick of the pop-ups, you can either just turn off the notification, or run the installer again, which includes an Uninstall option.
