I've checked around and I don't see any formal means to be notified
when a new piece of email is received.
Yes, I do realize the general problem of the many different mail
clients but my interest is (for now) in Mail.app.
Given that, what would be the general counsel for best way to keep up-
to-date with new mail?
I have the AppleScript to get unread counts from any desired
mailbox, I'm thinking I should just run this AppleScript using
NSTimer.
Polling the unread count would be unreliable; e.g. users may get and
read new mails between polls.
AKAIF, the only formal notification mechanism in Mail is its rules
system. e.g. You could set up a Mail rule that runs an AppleScript
when new messages arrive (rule creation can be scripted if you want to
set this up automatically). That script could then send an Apple event
to your application informing it that new mail has arrived, along with
any information about the received messages that your application
might need.
Depending on your requirements it might be possible for some other
email clients to invoke the same API, which will simplify adding
support for those.
You'd need to say more about what your app does and how it needs to
interact with email clients to give more specific suggestions.
You might also file a feature request on Mail, asking that it send a
distributed notification when new mail arrives.
