Mail.appetizer for Leopard

Woohoo! Mail.appetizer is back!.

Mail.appetizer is a great little freeware “notifier” for mail.app — the mail program that comes with Apples OS X.

What it does is pop up a little translucent window on your screen with the sender, subject and an excerpt of the message each time you receive mail. It also has buttons to mark the message as read, delete it, or go to mail to view it.

Why this is useful — if you’re head’s down working in something other than mail, you can quickly glance at a message as it comes in, delete spam, mark trivial stuff as read, or know whether it’s something you need to look at right away — all with minimal disruption to the task at hand.

Even better, it understands Spaces, so if your mail is in one Space, and you’re working in a different space, the notification comes up right where you are working, but if you click the “read” button, it takes you back to your mail space to read the message.

When I switched to mail.app from Entourage, I found that I relied heavily on Mail.appetizer to manage the mail portion of my daily workflow. Unfortunately, it didn’t work with mail.app 3.2, which came with Leopard, and I’ve missed it a lot.

Give it a try, but bear in mind that this is still a beta, and has a few quirks yet (although I’ve not seen anything major so far).

Mail.appetizer for Leopard (beta)