(From April 2004; since then I’ve taken to having an absolutely unobtrusive mail program — see Minimizing Mail.)
I have multiple email accounts in Panther Mail, checked automatically on a fairly rapid schedule (5 or 15 min intervals usually). While its Bayesian spam filtering is quite spiffy most of the time, there are occasional “false negatives” that get through. In addition, when I’m busy working it gets to be annoying to be bothered checking email when often it’s not that important.
I decided to leverage the power of the say command (man say for more info), which converts text to speech, and use its -o option to create .aiff files.
First, I created one to announce email for my Celsius1414 account:
say -o 1414.aiff "Message received for Celsius."
This spawns an AIFF sound file, which I drop in my ~/Library/Sounds folder. Then, within Mail’s preferences, I made a new Rule with a condition matching all email for the Celsius1414 account, which then performs a “Play Sound” action, matching that 1414 sound. Sweet!
I soon realized that this would, obviously, match all messages for 1414 including false-negative spam, so I added another condition that the sender be in my Address Book. I also turned off any other Mail sounds (easily added back in with simple Rules). Now, life is sweet, as my computer announces email that I’ll probably want to look at and leaves me alone to work otherwise.
Taking it up a notch (to paraphrase Emeril), I created a few more sounds and accompanying rules to match specific people and specific groups, so that I now have something akin to Uhura announcing incoming messages from Star Fleet. :)
