Questions regarding Mail.app

Is it the case with Mail in the latest version of Mavericks that the only way to be notified in real time that you have an incoming email is to leave the app running in the background all of the time? Is there no mechanism for checking your mailboxes "in the cloud" and/or downloading new mail and notifying you that you have new mail and then you open the application to read it?.

I leave Mail running and Notifications (upper right corner) lets me know immediately when something arrives in the inbox.
Why would you not want to leave Mail running?

osxx said:

I leave Mail running and Notifications (upper right corner) lets me know immediately when something arrives in the inbox.
Why would you not want to leave Mail running?

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I dunno, just seems like a clunky way to do things. I'm just getting used to using a mac again as my primary notebook after years with Linux and I guess we all just get used to certain things we like. I can go that way and leave it hidden. Thanks for the info.

I have not used Linux in awhile but I believe I had to leave Thunderbird open in order to get instant notifications or leave the webpage open in tabs for webmail notifications so after using Mail in OSX made more sense to me.

osxx said:

I have not used Linux in awhile but I believe I had to leave Thunderbird open in order to get instant notifications or leave the webpage open in tabs for webmail notifications so after using Mail in OSX made more sense to me.

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You may have had to leave thunderbird open but there are numerous small apps built in to some window managers and as add ons to others that live in either the sys tray or menubar that simply poll pop,IMAP, etc servers and send notifications to the desktop as well as offer to download to your specified location in some cases. There may be something like that available for OSX, in fact, if there isn't , I will be very surprised, but I can't seem to locate something that works well with the local notification system. If anything, I guess I can be happy that Mail.app has a fairly small operational footprint.

Take a look at this.

Thanx vansmith, That was exactly what I had been looking for. Someone on another forum suggested it too but all of the links and searches I did took me to a dead page. I really appreciate your taking the time to share this. It is EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Here's my (simpler) solution:

Designate the people you ACTUALLY want to be immediately notified of incoming email (for most people, this is a list of perhaps half a dozen people, tops) as VIPs.

Done. You'll be notified on all your devices when an email from that person arrives, and the first couple of lines of said email.

chas_m said:

Here's my (simpler) solution:

Designate the people you ACTUALLY want to be immediately notified of incoming email (for most people, this is a list of perhaps half a dozen people, tops) as VIPs.

Done. You'll be notified on all your devices when an email from that person arrives, and the first couple of lines of said email.

Click to expand...

That would still have required me to leave Mail opened all the time though.

No, it doesn't. I never leave Mail open.

Can you explain this procedure then cause I don’t understand what you mean. I already have VIP’s in my mail but when one of them sends me an email, I don’t get a notification unless mail is opened.

Sure.

I have my Mail program set to only check for new email when I open it, so your mileage may vary. The reason I do this is because my other devices (iPad, iPhone) are set to "push" email. So when I get an email from a VIP, a notification appears on my iPhone or iPad. I can of course deal with it on those devices, but if I prefer to open Mail on my Mac then once Mail is open and has downloaded the VIP email I also get a notification on my Mac (but of course by that time I've already opened, read and replied to the VIP email)

Solved

For anyone following this thread, I found macbiff. It does precisely what I was wanting including notification albeit in a little different way but it’s all good. If I could combine Notify and macbiff I’d be in heaven. Hopefully Yosemite will have this ironed out and it’ll all soon be moot.