Herald Bumps Apple Mail Notification Up A Notch

Herald, by Erik Hinterbichler, is a powerful yet lightweight email notification plugin for Apple's Mail.app. Last year, I posted about another excellent email notification plugin for Apple Mail called mail.appetizer.

The reason I say that "Herald bumps Apple mail notification up a notch" is because Herald takes the idea first implemented by mail.appetizer and adds some nice improvements. In fact, Erik Hinterbichler freely admits that Herald is "[i]nspired by the excellent Mail.appetizer plugin."

Herald improves upon Mail.appetizer in a few ways. Herald allows you to customize the color and opacity of your notification window, and enables you to perform a few additional actions right from within the notification window.

Here's how it works: When a new email comes in, the notification window appears. It will disappear after a few seconds if you do nothing. If you hover your mouse over the window, it will become opaque and stay put as long as your mouse is over top of it. If the body of the email is too long to display in the window, you can actually scroll the length of the email to read the whole thing. Clicking the checkmark on the right marks the email as read and dismisses the window. Clicking on the magnifying glass opens the email in the Mail program. Clicking the reply arrow opens up a mail reply window and you can start writing a reply right away. The next button over is a junk box, which you can use to - you guessed it - mark the email as spam. Finally, clicking the delete button simply deletes the email.

Using this great plugin, I am able to deal with most of the email that comes my way, as it comes in, with a very minimal disruption to my focus.

Herald is graciously provided for free, so, if you really like it, please drop by Erik's site and show him your support by clicking that Donate button on the right-hand side!

Comments

[William Lewis]

Thanks for the recommendation! I have been trying the app out for a few days and am pleased to report that it has made it past the probation period ... and is officially in use now.