Whenever you upgrade an operating system, you inevitably end up leaving a few old friends behind—faithful applications that, for whatever reason, no longer work on your new system of choice. With Leopard, losing Mail.appetizer was a particularly painful wrench, but the current beta now plays nice with Apple’s latest and greatest.
What Mail.appetizer does is save Mail users time. Mail’s Dock icon merely lists the number of new emails, but Mail.appetizer provides a resizable and customizable notification window that enables you to glance at the first few lines of each incoming email. Usefully, the window provides controls, enabling you to mark an email as read, delete it or open it in Mail.
What elevates Mail.appetizer from being merely very handy to being utterly essential is the level of control you have over the notification window’s content. The most obvious settings are all present and correct: the time each message appears for, the window transparency level, font settings, and so on. However, you can also restrict notifications to specific Mail accounts and fine-tune which aspects of messages are shown, including quotation levels and header titles. You can also decide whether Mail.appetizer hides when Mail is active and if it should open messages in separate windows or in the main Mail window.
It’s attention to detail that lifts Mail.appetizer to the dizzying heights of a Cult of Mac Essential award, and although the current release has a couple of niggles (a clash with GrowlMail and not marking as read items deleted using the notification window), it nonetheless comes very highly recommended for all Mail users.
Mail.appetizer provides various options for changing the way its notification window works.
Further information
Manufacturer: Bronson Beta
Price: free
URL: bronsonbeta.com/mailappetizer/beta/
