Notifications

I use OWATM mainly as a conduit to get exchange notifications to growl. Right now, the alert shows up as "
OWA Tray Monitor - New Mail You have XXX unread emails in your inbox"


While this is certainly helpful, instead of reporting how many unread messages I have, sending the current emails Author and Subject would be infinitely more useful. Ideally, it would also show a "
group indicator"
much like gmail does, where it would preface the Notification with "
>
>
"
if the message was sent only to you, "
>
"
if it was sent directly to you and others, or no indicator if it was sent to a mailing-list. (see http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answ ... nswer=8156 )
This, combined with Author, Subject and maybe the first few words of the email relates all the information I need at a glance. An example notification would read:

[Notifier] [Author] : [Subject] - [First 40 characters of email]

ie:

>
>
John Doe: Input needed - Can you review the document...

or

Generic Store: Buy our product - New release of irrelevant stuff...


just my 2 cents. Thanks for the tool, it's handy for work " title="Smile" />

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

How would you propose to handle multiple new messages within a single scan cycle?

Personally, I'd want separate notifications for each email message that comes in. If multiple messages come in on one update, just send multiple notifications. I could also see this as an option, where multiple messages are combined in one notification. For people who get lots and lots of mail, it might make sense to have a cap on the number of messages aggregated in one notification. So, for instance, one notification might look like:

>
>
Bob Jones - Hi there: Blah blah blah blah...
>
Joe Jones - Meeting at 2: Talk about important stuff so t...
>
>
Jeff Smith - Question: Hey, could you stop over and take a lo...
[+5 more messages]

If you're getting more than three emails every update, then you're probably addicted to your blackberry anyway " title="Smile" />
In fact, having a hard cap on the number of notifications per minute might be a good idea no matter what, just so someone doesn't get inundated with messages in case they get some rogue notification system sending 100's of emails a minute.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

Good suggestions. I'll do some prototyping and see how realistic this would be to produce. One of the driving forces behind OWAtray was to make it lightweight and simple;
the last thing I want to do is bloat it up.

I appreciate your interest though and welcome any more comments you may have.

At the very least, you could get away without adding any more options or complexity to the program, if that's what you're worried about. Simply replacing the "
you have XX unread emails in your Inbox"
message with some useful details would make the program much more useful.

New version uploaded to go some way to achieving what you are looking for. It was a good suggestion.
See blog for details.

Very untested at the moment so please try and let me know what you think.

In general, I think this works great.

Notifications are sent on any message marked 'unread', which means that when OWANotify starts up, old messages that are unread are _all_ sent as notifications (up to the limit, which is set to 10 in the .config file). This may not be the expected behavior for old mail. I always have a bunch of unread mail sitting around, so I'll always end up with 10 new notifications every time OWANotify gets started (ie: every reboot).

It might be better to send a single "
You have XX old unread messages"
notification at startup, instead of individually notifying about old mail. I think this would fit in with most peoples expectations that notifications are for 'new' messages, as a real-time alert.

Yes, on reflection I like your suggestion better.

New version upped with this functionality.