ManilaMail is an itty bitty “status bar” application that controls some of the most vital functions of Apple Mail in Mac OS X. This application is based off of the Gmail part of the Google Notifier and as such it is extremely light weight. There is no Growl integration or anything fancy like that. However, this little app is still very useful and it provides the following amazing features:

• The ability to display the count of all unread messages (not only the messages in the inbox)
• Menu items to show the inbox, create a new message, and check for new messages
• The optional ability to automatically reopen Apple Mail if it is closed when ManilaMail is trying to do a count of unread messages
• And that is about it

For the curious, here is a screenshot of ManilaMail in action:

Note that this application can reopen Apple Mail if Mail is closed between unread message counts. Some may see this as a flaw but this is exactly what I wanted this application to do when I first designed it. The idea is to keep the user from accidentally closing Mail and therefore not receiving notifications of new mail. This behavior is now optional but useful to me because I often close Mail accidentally.

Questions? Comments? Drop me a line at manilamail ATTA jkbrowning.com (replace "ATTA" with @ and remove the spaces)

ManilaMail is open source and is licensed under a BSD-like license. To view the ManilaMail license, see the "About" section of the Preferences window.


Download ManilaMail 1.5 (Universal Binary)

Download ManilaMail Source

Take a peek at the sidebar over there for installation instructions.

Change Log:

1.5

• NOTE: This will be the last major release of ManilaMail for Mac OS X Tiger (see my blog for more information)
• ManilaMail now automatically checks for updates during startup
• Various bug fixes and UI tweaks

1.1

• The ability to disable the automatic opening of Mail if it is closed during a message count

1.0.1

• Fixed a bug that did not allow user defaults to be read until the user opened the preference panel
• Made the counting of messages in all mailboxes the default setting (previously the default setting was inbox only)
• Disabled the counting of messages in the Outbox as new messages

1.0

• Initial release

ManilaMail is for Mac and Mac only

Though it may run on earlier versions of Mac OS, ManilaMail has only been tested on Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger"

Installation Instructions:

1. Double-click ManilaMail_1.5.zip to extract the archive
2. Drag ManilaMail to your Applications folder
3. Double-click ManilaMail
4. You're done!

ManilaMail resides in your menu bar so the "Mm" you see in your menu bar is ManilaMail. (see the screenshot to the left)

To uninstall, drag ManilaMail to the trash and delete the com.jkbrowning.ManilaMail file in the Libraries/Preferences folder in your home directory.