Recommendations for an Email Checker?

[rob.h]

Has anyone got any recommendations for a good email checker? I don't want to have mail or Entourage running in the background and so would prefer an applet which can check my various mail.app, POP3 and IMAP accounts in the background and perhaps show a number or something simple to indicate that I have new mail. Hotmail support would be nice, but isn't essential.

I have been searching for something but can't seem to find an application that covers all three systems. eCheck & POP (Apple downloads) looked to be just what I wanted, but it seems they've been discontinued as they're not compatible with Leopard

When I was a Windows user I used a Yahoo widget called Informer which was really good, but unfortunately the email sensors in it don't work properly under OS X.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[dalison]

I recently consolidated all my e-mail into Gmail. It can pop up to 5 other accounts for you or if you have your own domain name Gmail will host it for you, which means all of your mail is in a single place and searchable from wherever you are.

Once everything is on Gmail you can use the Gmail Notifier to check on it, though there are lots of others out there.

If you decide to stick with monitoring POP accounts you should make sure you get something that supports Growl, a great general purpose notification system for Mac. Here is a list of e-mail tools that support Growl.