ManilaMail is an itty bitty "status bar" application that controls 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
Note that this application will can reopen 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
will be optional in a future version. This behavior is
now optional as I have received feedback from people who did
not like it.
PRIONUX This issue has been fixed in the latest version. I have made this behavior optional because I actually do want Mail to reopen if I accidentally close it. Enjoy!
LONNIEHB While the idea is a great one - I'm having issues with the app. If I close mail and leave manilamail running after about 3 seconds - manilamail opens my mail.app back up. I tested it on 2 computers and it does it on both. If I don't have manilamail running, mail.app works fine on close. Small issue, but it's enough to make me uninstall manilamail. (Version 1.0)