If you use Outlook, you're probably tired of having to go to its sprawling program window to check for mail. Wouldn't life be easier if you had an assistant telling you every time you've got a new piece of Email? That's exactly what Mail Alert ($7, thirty-day free trial) does.
It's easy to configure your alert options in Mail Alert.Mail Alert runs as an add-in to Outlook, and constantly monitors your email inbox to see if any mail is waiting for you. When you've got mail, it pops up a desktop alert with important information from the email, including the sender, subject, and beginning of the message itself. You can configure how the alerts work, so that you can have it play a sound or not, and display an envelope icon or not when you have new email. In addition, you can configure how long the alert appears, whether to have them automatically dismissed after a certain amount of time, and so on.
If that were all Mail Alert did, that would be enough. But it does more as well. It also works as a mini email client, so that you don't need to head into Outlook for common tasks for incoming mail, such as reading it, responding to it, flagging it for follow-up, forwarding it, and more. Mail Alert does require that you have Outlook open, but at least you can minimize Outlook and work in Mail Alert's smaller window instead.
Will Mail Alert change your life? No. Will it give you back some much-needed time every day? Most likely yes. At $7 it's not overly expensive, so may well be worth paying for it you're tired of constantly monitoring mail in Outlook.
Note that in addition to being a 30-day trial, the trial version will also display 10 alerts each time you start Outlook.
--Preston Gralla
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