The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: ecamm network / Product Page
• Price: $8.00 [7 day demo]

Ever been frustrated with Mail's simplistic new message count in its Dock icon? You get one number, representing only the messages in your inbox. But if you use rules to filter messages, you probably have unread mail in a number of folders, too. Enter DockStar. This Mail plug-in lets you view the unread count for up to five different mailboxes in Mail. I'm on a number of mailing lists, and I find this little tool is quite helpful for tracking new activity on four of them (in addition to my main inbox).

The UI is quite intuitive, though I found the color-changing wheels to be somewhat tricky to use -- I'd love to see a pop-up for the standard color picker instead. But beyond that, it's well thought out, and you can even pick from a set of different graphics for each badge's background. Dan Frakes wrote about DockStar in this week's Mac Gems article, and he's got a lot more detail if you're interested.