How did I get along for so long without this app?! Now I don't have to keep a Mail window open and visible to know when new mail arrives (I keep my dock hidden, and the sound is often turned down, so I need a visual indication of new mail).

I have four email accounts, but one I don't need to keep a close eye on. I have set DockStar to display icons for the three accounts I care about in the menubar, using a coloured icon for my primary account so it catches my eye, and monochrome icons for the other two. I have also customized the sounds for each account, too, so when I have the sound turned on I can tell which account received new mail (my only complaint is that I'd like to be able to turn up the volume, as the sounds in DockStar seem quieter than the default Mail sounds).

DockStar gives me up to five badges/icons, so I use the fifth one to keep an eye on my Junk folder, where legitimate emails sometimes end up. DockStar can count all emails in a folder, not just unread ones, so I know when Mail has flagged a message as Junk and marked it as read. Now I won't miss any messages that are incorrectly marked as junk.

I've been using DockStar for years, and find it indispensable for the way I work.

Basically, I have a lot of rules set up in Mail to sort incoming emails into folders (actually, "mailboxes"). I've configured DockStar to alert me both visually with a badge and with a sound effect for certain important emails, just visually with a badge for other emails, and to not alert me for unimportant emails like newsletters, promos, etc.

In other words, it's very malleable.

I just wrote to the developer asking for volume control of the sound effect alert, and he's got it working, but not through the GUI yet.

Awesome support, fantastic product.

I have emailed the developers and I hope we see an update soon. In the past Dockstar has been quickly updated, which is why I purchased it.

It has become an indispensable tool in my workflow.

Juist in case my reply got buried: the developer has just completed 2.1.3, and it works just fine for me. Very prompt fix. Good Stuff!

I may have to get this now. The addition of a menu-item makes this program useful for me finally. I keep my dock hidden, so dock labels aren't very useful. All I want is the number of mails on the menu-bar, in the least space.

Even the old programs that used to do that are growing incompatible (not sure if MailUnread will work with Leopard). And most of them had a useless icon on the menubar next to the number of mails. Like I'd forget what the number was? Happily deleting the icon file made it go to just a slim number. Whew.

But now this flashy program, that doesn't cost too much, will do that for me, with maybe some other features too? I may have to take you up on it. Nice job.

Just a heads-up: The 10.6.1 Snow Leopard update, which updates Mail to 4.1, breaks Dockstar along with several other bundles that worked under 10.6. Hopefully it's a minor fix and won't take too long to show up.

Is there a problem with the Input Manager that Dockstar installs? Whenever I install Dockstar on my system I start having frequent crashes of both Firefox and Safari. When I remove the Ecamm folder from the Input Manager folder the crashes stop.

Anyone else had this experience?

thanks

Slight problem with the subfolders feature - I have an 'all unread' Smart Folder which has one of its rules as 'Folder is not Work Email'.

However, 'Work Email' is the root of my work IMAP account. The Smart Folder correctly excludes everything in the account, including subfolders. but DockStar only excludes items in the root of the account, not the subfolders. As a result, the unread count is much larger than what actually appears in the Smart Folder.

(Given the number of folders in the work account, adding them manually to the rule is a bit of a non-starter, too :)