GrowlMail on Snow Leopard: A Temporary Fix

August 28, 2009 · Posted in Tech 

[Update: Hunter Ford has taken the time to extend my very basic script so that it includes the details of the sender and an extract of the text of the mail in the Growl notification. Head over there and grab the new script: it's way better than mine.]

If you use GrowlMail, you’ll be disappointed to learn that it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard yet. Since I keep my dock hidden, without GrowlMail I don’t know that I’ve received mail unless I roll over the dock, which is frustrating and adds a little bit of background anxiety to my day.

While the awesome Growl team are working on a fix, here’s a small AppleScript that I wrote to give me a notification whenever a mail arrives. It’s less functional than the full thing because it doesn’t tell you anything about the mail other than it has arrived.

There’s no title, summary or who it’s from like there is with GrowlMail, but that’s good enough for me as a stop gap. If you figure out a way to include those details, I’d love to hear about it though.

Anyway, the script. 

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
   set the allNotificationsList to {"New Email Arrived"}

   set the enabledNotificationsList to {"New Email Arrived"}

   default notifications enabledNotificationsList icon of application "Mail"

   notify with name "New Email Arrived" title "New mail" description "New mail arrived." application name "Mail Notifier"
end tell

Copy that into AppleScript Editor (as it is now called in Snow Leopard), or you can download it from here. Save it somewhere sensible (I used /Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts)

Then, add a rule to Mail for every mail that arrives and have it run the AppleScript. Here’s a screenshot:

Screenshot of the Mail Rules editor

And that’s all there is to it. Hope you find it helpful.

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Comments

9 Responses to “GrowlMail on Snow Leopard: A Temporary Fix”

  1. Matt on August 28th, 2009 14:44

    Nice workaround James! It’ll hold me over until the growl team’s up to speed.

  2. rudy on August 29th, 2009 03:58

    GrowlMail is actually already fixed in the mercurial repository. I think Peter just fixed the last remaining issue with GrowlSafari. he should be building the 1.2b1 Growl dmg soon.

  3. suleiman on August 29th, 2009 06:23

    Woot! I can’t wait to finally be using a fully 64bit enabled version of Growl.

    Yet another must-have app I can knock off the list now that I’ve upgraded to snow leopard.

  4. cbeau on August 29th, 2009 18:46

    Thanks – this is great!

  5. Graeme on September 1st, 2009 15:09

    Thanks for this – really helpful! :-)

  6. Hunter Ford on September 1st, 2009 21:08

    You have inspired me to write a script that includes all the details of the message in the growl notification.

    I hope you find it helpful! :)

    http://www.cupcakewithsprinkles.com/growl-notifications-for-apple-mail-on-mac-os-x-snow-leopard-10-6/

  7. higgis on September 2nd, 2009 09:58

    @Hunter – that’s awesome! I’ll update the post to point people at your solution.

  8. Barry Ward on September 16th, 2009 13:31

    Works a treat, and will do nicely till GM is fixed. Thanks!

  9. abdulaziz on September 23rd, 2009 16:06

    thanks it works @HUNTER FORD and @Jame.

    it works.

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