HowTo: Multiple GMail Notifiers & Accounts on OS X June 1st, 2007

This week at Integrum we switched over to a Google Apps For Domains interface for our mail service. Along with the super easy calendar sharing and GMail web interface, it gave me an opportunity to try a few cool tricks to make my GMail as close as possible to my Mail.app.

The first hurdle was creating a hierarchy of labels and filters to replace the folders and rules I had sorting my incoming mail. Using the Folders4Gmail script for Greasemonkey allows me to create a nest of folders under the following format:

  1. create a label called Foo
  2. create a label called Foo\Bar
  3. Folders4Gmail will display Bar as a subfolder of Foo.
  4. lather, rinse repeat (should be three separate steps but I'm saving space)

After setting my filters to put things in the right "folder" now, I went about installing two copies of GmailNotifier for Mac (one for my personal email and one for the work one). To do this, just install the first one as normal. Then copy the app over from the disk image to the applications folder under a different name (ie gmailnotifierWork). This works on the surface level, however once you restart your computer or the google notifier, you'll run into a problem where it signs you into the same account twice. Thanks to this post at MacOSXHints, you can see how to configure the package to use a separate preferences file; Thus now two independent Google Notifiers running side by side.

"But wait Conrey," you wail in desperation, "I have two identical envelopes on my desktop, I can't tell the difference between my two accounts!"

I'm no artist, so I enlisted our designer here at Integrum, Matt, to draw up a tiny Integrum Logo to replace the unread.png and nounread.png files within the app package mentioned in the macosxhints link above. Rather than editing the Info.plist file, go into the Resources folder and rename the unread.png and nounread.png files to something innocuous like unread.png1 and replace the file with your own creation. Voila, you now get a different icon to show off your cloned Google Notifier.

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