I am not sure that polling your mailserver so frequently is a good thing to do. The Idle command has very little overhead, but direct checking a lot more (if I remember it correctly). I use instead Growl to announce the arrival of new mail.

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Yes, polling every minute places quite a load on the mail server -- oh, obviously not if it's just one user doing it, and if it's your own personal server, go for it. But if, say, half of the 10,000 users of some mail server do this, the effect is not too different from a Denial Of Service attack on the server. You may find that your provider's instructions for setting up your connection to the server insist on a minimum polling time of 5, 10, or 15 minutes, to avoid just such an unmanageable load (and I've seen servers that are configured to quickly return a cached "nope, nothing new" response to someone who keeps polling too often).

IMAP IDLE, on the other hand, imposes almost no load on the server, and gets you your mail nearly instantly. So you're likely much better off getting the Mail.app problem sorted out, or using Growl.

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Interesting, but I don't think this is the whole story on Mail not sounding the new mail chime. Mail often goes silent on me, but I only have POP accounts. No IMAP and no IDLE command.



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You can always set up a rule to make a chime whenever new mail arrives. While I can't test it, I would think this would circumvent the bug more effectively.

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I ended up having to write rules that execute an Applescript to to make Mail behave consistently with regard to new mail alerts.

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Wolfy

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I just tried making a rule that plays a sound for every new message, and it does not work (with IDLE enabled).

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It works for me, but then, mail will play the alert twice.

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My Mail sounds finally came back after I applied the Combo Update to OS X 10.5.6. Up to now I've been using Growl to announce new mail. Now I'm getting double announcements. ;-)

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I had the same problem - no mail sounds from the start of 10.5. No removal of preferences or other operations would fix it. I only have POP accounts. Installing 10.5.6 suddenly fixed it and it's back to normal. Apple must have found something.

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I've found Mail's support of the IDLE command to be problematic at best. Instead of not hearing the new mail sound, I simply wasn't getting any new messages at all -- until I went into Mail, switched to a different mailbox (e.g. Sent), and back to the Inbox, at which point all of the new messages in the queue would appear. I knew it wasn't working, because my iPod touch continued to receive new mail, while the new message count on the Mail icon on my Mac never changed.

The only push mail that works properly with Mail so far is MobileMe. Activating IDLE for my Gmail-hosted accounts always required me to manually synchronize mailboxes or refresh them by switching to another mailbox and back to the Inbox.

Useless. Went back to checking for mail every 5 minutes and decided that works better for now.

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Activating IDLE for my Gmail-hosted accounts always required me to manually synchronize mailboxes or refresh them by switching to another mailbox and back to the Inbox.

When you set up IDLE did you turn off periodic checking at the same time? IDLE actually has a timeout, after which a full check is necessary to get it set up again. While it would be nice for this to happen automatically, it doesn't seem to.

I seem to recall seeing somewhere that the timeout is something like 29 minutes. I know when I set the 'check for new mail' frequency to 30 minutes IDLE seems to stop working. Setting it to 15 minutes and IDLE seems to work exactly like it is supposed to. i.e. anytime email arrives I'm instantly notified, even if it is outside that 15 minutes check time.

I've noticed a lot of sites recommending changing the automatic check interval to something very high, or even off, when setting up an IDLE account. In my experience that never works, but using anything less than 30 minutes seems to work just fine.

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I've had similar problems as described above (basically not getting alerts for new messages at all until I initiated some connection to the server).

In particular I noticed this after my computer went to sleep (obviously it would time out during this period). In this case, I'm not sure that setting your interval to just under 30 minutes will help because you'd potentially have to wait almost that amount of time for mail to do a full check and resume the IDLE.

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I also have not heard the new mail sound since upgrading to 10.5 on my old eMac or my new iMac. I have 2 POP accounts and 3 Gmail POP accounts, but only one of the Gmail accounts checks every minute, the others check only when clicking on "Get Mail". I have never used an IMAP account. When setting up a rule along the lines of "When any message type=mail, play sound" it will beep for OUTGOING mail messages, but still will not beep for incoming mail messages. When I add the condition to have icon bounce in the dock it will do it (so the rule it working, but the beep isn't). I could probably write an AppleScript to get around this, but if someone already has a good one could you post it?

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Here's another gotcha to look out for: if you've disabled "user interface sound effects" (for example, the sound that's played when you move a file to the trash in Finder is a user interface sound effect) in System Preferences, this also disables Mail's new message alert.

Now, what if you want Mail's message alert and don't want the stupid and annoying (IMHO) user interface sound effects? The solution is to enable user interface sound effects in System Preferences, and to disable the Finder's sound effects using Tinker Tool.

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That's it!! I noticed a few months ago that I wasn't hearing any "new mail" sound from Mail and also I wasn't seeing the mail icon bounce out of the hidden dock onto the desktop, in spite of the fact that a mail rule was being executed that had both "Play Sound" and "Bounce Icon in Dock" as actions. I couldn't tell that new mail had arrived unless I moused over the hidden dock.

As mentioned above, disabling the System Preference, Sound panel, option "Play user interface sound effects" turns off all mail sounds, even when explicitly played by a rule. It also stops a bouncing dock icon from bouncing out of a hidden dock onto the desktop. This is clearly a bug.

So turning on the "Play user interface sound effects" is really the only option if you want mail alerts. As mentioned above, if the sounds from the Finder drive you crazy, the (free) Tinker Tool is the easiest way to disable them. Alternatively, you can open a Terminal window and type (with exact upper/lower case shown):

defaults write com.apple.finder FinderSounds -bool no

immediately followed by pressing Command-Option-Escape and relaunching the Finder. To undo this, change the "no" to a "yes."







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My comment immediately above about the bouncing dock icon when the dock is hidden is incorrect; it is not controlled by the "Play user interface sound effects" preference. The reason the hidden dock sometimes shows the bouncing icon and sometimes not is more complicated -- I'll submit it as a hint.

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