Notify 2: Email in Your Menubar

I recently wrote a review of Mailplane, which is a menubar plug-in and local mail client . It’s the best solution I know for accessing your Google without having to open your account in a web browser. But even more important, it offers previews in the menubar of emails without having to open the application itself.

Well, after using Mailplane, I wanted to see if there was a similar menubar solution for Apple’s Mail. I receive emails throughout the day as I‘m working at my computer, and I avoid opening the Mail client as much as I can. It’s not that it’s clunky or anything, but it’s a distraction when you access it and see all the unread emails. Plus, more than half the emails that show up there are not immediately important.

So a similar solution I found to Mailplane is Vibealicious’s Notify 2. It’s a well designed app that puts multiple accounts, including Gmail/Google Apps, MobileMe and Rackspace Email into your menubar. It’s a less obtrusive way of getting previews of incoming emails.

Right from the drop-down inbox, you can view your list of new and unread emails, as well get a larger preview of selected messages. You can also mark single or all messages as Read, and send emails from the client.

And on top of all those features you can set it up to receive Growl notifications, which is convenient for when you’re sitting at your computer throughout the day; you can simply glance over at Growl notifications that appear for a few seconds on your desktop.

Finally, I like that when you click away from the inbox, it closes without you having to click on the icon in the menubar.

The only two draw backs to the app is that it doesn’t connect to your local mail client. It takes you to the web client instead. Also, in addition to the “out of the box” supports for the clients listed above, it can support generic IMAP accounts, but not POP3 accounts.

Notify 2 has crashed on me a couple of times, but only when I was accessing its preferences. Other than that, so far I haven’t had any silent crashes.

The app comes in both free and pro ($10) versions. The limitations on the free versions are such that if you find yourself using the app you’ll want to get the pro version, which, for example, allows you to mark all messages as read instead of marking each one at a time in the free version.

All and all, Notify 2 is a nice app. The company is working on 2.1 updates that will include among other things integration with Apple’s Mail client. With that feature, I‘m a happy camper. I’m glad I found Notify 2.