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!

According to CrunchBase, Scott MacGregor was “a lead engineer at Mozilla Corporation,” and Sherman Dickman was “Director of Product Management at Mozilla Corporation” where he “oversaw market and customer research, analytics and metrics.” Suffice it to say, these guys know something about building an email application.

Postbox grabbed some attention last fall when it was launched at TechCrunch50. You can view their demo below.

Postbox is currently in private beta. I was invited to the beta program about a week and a half ago and have had an opportunity to put Postbox through its paces.

Although I was very excited about Postbox from the beginning and really wanted to like the app, unfortunately, I am underwhelmed. Ultimately, Postbox feels like Thunderbird-dressed-up-all-pretty; which shouldn’t be surprising since this app is built on Mozilla by two former Mozilla employees.

What sets Postbox apart from other email applications?

See for yourself:

Main Interface

Conversation View

Document Search

Image Search

Text Search

Topics Panel

Contacts Panel

New Message Window with Image Search

New Message Window with Places Search

(Source)

Some other things you can do with Postbox:

• Twitter – you can highlight text from an email, right-click and post that text to Twitter. I’m not sure I see how useful this is, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to have the option. I’ve never felt like I just had to twitter something someone sent me in an email. They would do better, in my opinion, to build in a full Twitter client that could show a threaded conversation view. That would actually be useful.
• Annotate Emails – I have not seen this anywhere else, but you can actually add text to emails that people have sent to you as a way to annotate them. This is a pretty neat idea. As a lawyer, however, I tend to treat emails as archival; as evidence of a communication that has occurred. That said, I feel weird adding text to an email because I feel like I’m altering the record. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid (I know you’re listening!). If you can get past the dirty feeling you get by altering a sacred digital record of communication, then this could actually be pretty useful.
• Easy Links, Maps, Images: One of the coolest features about Postbox is the ability to very easily add links, maps, and images to your new emails. When composing new email, on the right-hand side, there is a pane where you can run a quick google or wikipedia search which will display results as you type. You can then drag any of the results over to your message to send to somebody. This can actually come in handy. Check the screenshot below.

What I don’t like about Postbox?

• No Quick Look: As cool as Postbox is in the way it helps you collect and search your attachments, it does not (yet) include support for Quick Look. In our office, we scan all outgoing and incoming mail, pleadings, etc. These scans come into my email box with nondescript filenames. I love how Mail.app allows you to do a Quick Look at an attachment, allowing you to see the full contents of the document without actually opening up the attachment. Obviously, this is much faster than going through the emails one by one and opening the attachments one at a time. This is actually a deal breaker for me.
• No Unified Inbox: Also a deal breaker for me is the lack of a unified inbox. By this, I mean that you can only view your emails one account at a time. I have three main email accounts that I must manage with my email client. In Mail.app, I can have all emails come into my one Inbox. I don’t have to click on my work email account to see my work email, then my personal email account to see my personal email, then my EsquireMac email account to see my EsquireMac email. Beyond this, with Mail.app, I can view all of the folders and sub-folders for all of my email accounts at one time and drag and drop emails between accounts with the magic of IMAP.
• Slow: Postbox has some great features, but it is not fast. Mail.app feels rock solid and is the fastest email client I’ve ever used. Postbox has about the same feel to it as Thunderbird. When you click on an email, there is a definite stuttering period where it is getting its crap together so it can do you the favor of actually displaying the contents of the email you just clicked on. It is not instantaneous like Mail.app.
• One Signature Per Account: Perhaps this is no big deal to some people, but Postbox only allows one signature per account. You actually have to create a text file containing your signature, then point Postbox to that text file to pull your signature from it. It’s a bit klugy.

Conclusion

All in all, Postbox is innovative and is taking the desktop email client in the right direction. I think they’ve already outshone Thunderbird. They’ve got some ground to cover, though, performance-wise and feature-wise, if they’re going to unseat Mail.app.

Oh, I almost forgot. Postbox will be a free application and works on Mac OS X and Windows.

There’s plenty more to learn about Postbox, so don’t take my word for it. Read up on Postbox and sign up for the beta here.

Finis Price (TechnoEsq) says:

a study done by Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University in England, found that “it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train if thought after interruption by email…So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.” While most people claim to check their email every 15 minutes, when actually studied, the average user actually checked their email every five minutes.

I have to say that I very rarely “check” my email. I look for the red badge to show up, and if there’s an unread email, I tend to it. I admit that it probably does take me a few seconds/minutes to get back on track.  However, I gave up on using Growl for Mail.app notifications, and instead, now use Mail.appetizer.

I am a huge fan of Mail.appetizer. It’s advantage over GrowlMail is simple: you can actually perform actions from the notification window. Oh, and like Growl and GrowlMail it’s free.

When an email comes in, you can preview as much of the email as you wish by resizing the window. Once you know what it is, you can do something (or nothing) with the email. By clicking the “x” button (bottom-left), you simply send the notification away. By clicking the delete button, you can actually delete the email without even bringing the Mail.app to focus. By clicking the magnifying-glass button, your Mail program comes to focus with that particular email selected for viewing. Finally, if you don’t want to switch to Mail.app, but you’ve gotten the gist of the email from the notification window, and you don’t need to leave it in “unread” status, you can click the checkmark button and it will mark the email as “read” without switching to Mail.app. This is beautiful if you are like me and go bonkers if there are unread messages staring you in the face with that nasty red badge. 

I suppose, as an alternative, I could take MacSparky’s approach and turn off all notifications – but I ain’t there yet. I like to know when emails come in. Sometimes, particular clients need immediate attention, and sometimes, minutes can matter.

Ultimately Mail.appetizer saves me time and enables me to be more efficient than if I was using GrowlMail or nothing at all.