Monday marked a sad day for NotifyMail. After 13.5 years of using the product that I wrote (it helped launch my career), I have finally stopped using it. Do I still want to be notified instantly of new mail? Absolutely. Do I still believe in the product? Well, sort of. Several months back, I wrote about my switch to IMAP. While I was having an email exchange with a friend, I couldn’t understand how he responded so quickly. He said his mail client just kept putting new messages in his mailbox and I soon learned about IMAP IDLE. I found a plugin for Mail.app and sources tell me that this is a standard part of Leopard’s Mail.app client. IMAP IDLE basically keeps a connection open to the server and just gets pinged when there is new mail or a new transaction. This is much better than NotifyMail because there is no server configuration required and no separate desktop app to run. It does keep a connection open, but sends/receives very little traffic.
Please, a moment of silence for NotifyMail.
I first used NotifyMail back in 1996, when I started working for DataViz, who at the time used QuickMail. Little did I know that 9 years later Scott would interview me and we’d work together!
Thanks for a great product. I also had to stop using NotifyMail after moving to 10.6. For fun I thought I’d try something similar using netcat. A little clunky but it works. Here’s the link if anyone else would like to play with it:
http://putnamhill.net/sh/notifymail.html