Having used Thunderbird on my Mac for a couple of years now, I grew accustomed to the Growl notifications it provided (via a plugin) when new email arrived. The time came to switch to an Exchange server, as our email host was getting worse and worse.
I’ve read different reviews on Entourage 2008, but none so bad as to totally put me off at least trying it out. I have to say it’s really good on a few aspects that Thunderbird lacks, but that’s a matter for another post. What really brought me to a spate of AppleScript and some graphics work was the so ugly default popup notifications provided by Entourage, and their position at the bottom of the screen. For a heavy Growl user, totally counter-intuitive. One thing led to another, and I ended up with a script that does the following:
- Generates a Growl notification with the default style for each new email that arrives (or those you want to – more on this later).
- Shows the email subject in the notification title, and below the sender’s name (or email address if the sender has no display name), and the first 80 characters of the email – enough to give you a feel of what’s in it.
- Shows a custom icon for high and highest priority emails, which also have their notifications made sticky.