You’ve got too much mail!
This weekend I happened to be glancing at the list of applications that support Growl and noticed MacBiff, a biff-like application that supports checking multiple IMAP servers.
I just now abandoned it again, though, for the following reasons:
- The application is geared towards someone who may have multiple accounts but assumes they all pretty much serve the same purpose. In the menu bar it shows you the sum of all accounts, as far as new and total number of messages goes, where I’d want my work and private email to be shown separately.
- While it says to have an option for excluding folders in the total that have been marked as needing to be ignored, it’ll still include those in the total. I have huge archive folders and subfolders, causing this number to be quite out of proportion.
- I let Thunderbird do 99% of the filtering, these days, including marking certain messages as “read” immediately upon arrival because I only care about them for archival purposes. This means that occasionally, when MacBiff looks at the state of the IMAP account, there are messages in my inbox that seconds later will be filtered away (possibly no longer “new”) in different folders.
What I really need is an OS X specific extension (if that is even possible) that talks to Growl. Lacking that it’s very tempting to see if I can convince some Perl script to parse the filterlog.html and make sure there is a fall-back filter so that any and all messages are processed at least once.