Mail Notifier for Mac
Gmail and Outlook notifications in your Mac menu bar, without keeping a browser tab open.
First account free. Pro is name your price.
Screenshots
Features
- Gmail and Outlook accounts together in one menu bar app
- VIP senders with their own sounds
- No servers. Everything stays on your Mac.
- Read-only access to your mailbox
- As many Gmail and Outlook accounts as you want
- Per-account check intervals, notifications, and sounds
- 27 notification sounds
- A themed popover or the standard macOS menu
- Global keyboard shortcuts
- 22 languages
Mail Notifier watches as many Gmail and Outlook accounts as you want and tells you the moment mail arrives. It runs on your Mac with no servers behind it.
Your first account is free, with no limits. Add more accounts by subscribing to Pro (name your price, even if it's $0!)
I've been using it for over a year, and it's in pretty good shape.
Who Mail Notifier is for
I spend my day in the browser. I don't like to use email clients. But when you live in Gmail on the web, you don't get native macOS notifications like you would with Mail.app.
Mail Notifier watches all your accounts. It sits in the menu bar of your Mac and gives you a visual indication of your unread emails. When new mail arrives, it pops a native macOS notification.
You can customize notifications with your own sounds on a per-account basis, and you can set up special sounds when you receive an email from a specific email address (e.g., your partner, your boss, your Hermes bot, your cat.)
Why browser notifications fall short on a Mac
Gmail and Outlook can push notifications through your browser. That works, with conditions.
The tab has to stay open. Close it, quit the browser, or let the browser put the tab to sleep, and the notifications stop working.
Every browser does notifications differently (if at all!) You can silence a browser, and then you also silence its notifications.
Mail Notifier runs as its own app. It shows up in System Settings under Notifications by name, you allow it through a Focus mode by itself. It keeps checking your accounts whether or not a browser is open.
A browser tab, a mail client, or a menu bar app
| Browser tab | Full mail client | Mail Notifier | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs with the browser closed | No | Yes | Yes |
| Stores your mail on your Mac | No | Yes | No |
| A different sound per sender | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| Gmail and Outlook in one place | A tab each | Varies | Yes |
| Opens messages in your browser | Yes | No | Yes |
| Access it asks for | Full | Full | Read-only |
A full mail client is the right call when you want to write, search, and file mail on your Mac. Mail Notifier is for people who already have somewhere they like to read mail and just want to know when to go there.
Where Mail Notifier came from
For years the answer to this on a Mac was Gmail Notifr, written by James Chen. It sat in the menu bar, watched your Gmail, and played a sound. In March 2024 he sunset it. Google had started requiring an annual independent security assessment of any app that reads Gmail. Over the years, Google has made it impossible for indie developers to build on their platform without substantial friction, both effort and money.
Mail Notifier is a clean-room rewrite. It's a modern SwiftUI app built. It adds Outlook/Microsoft 365 (or whatever brand they're calling it by today) alongside Gmail. Most importantly, I paid Google their extortion fee to get it cleared and approved.
Why an email notifier costs anything at all
Reading your Gmail requires a restricted permission from Google, and every app that asks for one has to pass an annual independent security assessment. Google sucks and doesn't care about independent developers, so I have to pay the fee myself. That's why I have to charge for Mail Notifier. I'm really sorry.
Your credentials never leave your Mac. There are no servers. Complete privacy. Sign-in runs through OAuth 2.0 with Google or Microsoft directly, tokens sit in the Keychain, and the app only ever asks for read access. Send optional (anonymous!) telemetry to help improve the product. The privacy policy has the details.
Localized into 22 languages (including Klingon LOL).
The source is on GitHub, under the Mozilla Public License.
Questions
- Does Mail Notifier work when my browser is closed?
- Yes. Mail Notifier is a native macOS app that lives in the menu bar, so it keeps checking your accounts whether or not Safari, Chrome, or any other browser is running. Gmail and Outlook notifications sent through the web stop when you close the tab.
- Which email accounts does Mail Notifier support?
- Gmail and Outlook, in any combination, in one menu bar app. Add as many Google and Microsoft accounts as you want and give each one its own check interval, notification setting, and sound.
- Does Mail Notifier read my email?
- It reads only what it needs to tell you a message arrived: the sender, the subject, and the time. Access is read-only. The app asks Google for the gmail.readonly scope and Microsoft for Mail.Read, so it cannot send, delete, or change anything in your mailbox.
- Where do my credentials live?
- On your Mac, in the macOS Keychain. Signing in goes through OAuth 2.0 directly with Google or Microsoft, so the app never sees your password. There is no Mail Notifier server and no account to create, and your messages stay in memory rather than being written to disk.
- Can I set a different sound for specific people?
- Yes. Add someone to the VIP list and give them their own sound, so your boss, your partner, or your attorney gets a different alert than a newsletter does. There are 27 sounds to choose from, and every account can have its own default on top of that.
- How does Mail Notifier behave with macOS Focus modes?
- Like any other app. Mail Notifier appears in System Settings under Notifications by name, so you can allow it through a Focus mode on its own. Browser notifications come from the browser, which means allowing them lets every site through and silencing them silences Gmail along with everything else. Mail Notifier sends standard-priority notifications, so a Focus mode that blocks it will block it.
- What does Mail Notifier cost?
- The first account is free, with no feature limits and no trial clock. Watching more than one account at a time needs Pro, which is name your price. You decide what it is worth.
- Why does an email notifier cost anything?
- Reading Gmail requires a restricted permission from Google, and every app that asks for one has to pass an independent security assessment called CASA every year. That runs roughly $8,000 a year and the developer pays it. Gmail Notifr, the app that did this job on the Mac for years, was sunset in March 2024 over the same requirement.
- Is Mail Notifier on the Mac App Store?
- No. It ships as a signed and notarized DMG you download directly, and it updates itself through Sparkle with a check once a day. If you still have an older Mac App Store build in your Applications folder, delete that one before installing the DMG, because the two cannot coexist under the same bundle identifier.
- Is Mail Notifier a replacement for Gmail Notifr or Google Notifier?
- For the job both of them did, yes. Gmail Notifr by James Chen was sunset in March 2024, and Google retired its own Google Notifier for Mac years before that. Mail Notifier is a clean-room rewrite that carries none of the original source, adds Outlook alongside Gmail, and passed the Google assessment that ended Gmail Notifr. Fourteen of its twenty-seven sounds come from the original app.
- What version of macOS does Mail Notifier need?
- macOS 14.6 Sonoma or later.
- How often does Mail Notifier check for mail?
- Every 30 seconds by default, and the interval is set per account. You can take an account down to once a second or out to once every 15 minutes, depending on how much you want to hear from it.