Tired of boring beep when new email arrives? MailTones lets you pick a fresh new email sound, and set custom email tones for different friends, subjects, and email domains.
Now there ‘s something that lots of iPhone users have been wanting for a long, long time. I was very happy to get an offer from the folks at Electric Pocket to take a look at this app “ and I haven ‘t been disappointed.
MailTones lets you do all of the above and a bit more. I ‘ve been testing it out just quickly this afternoon and it works well and just as advertised.
The app includes 25 custom tones that you can assign to contacts, subjects (keywords), or domains. The tones include things like:
- A female voice saying ‘You have mail ‘
- A couple of different siren sounds
- A Big Ship Horn
- A very loud submarine ‘Dive ‘ sound
- Sad and ‘wah wah ‘ tones
- Printer noise
- Cheers (like a crowd cheering)
- Laser and guitar sounds
So, of course, I have set it to play the sound of a cheering crowd when a mail from my spouse comes in. And a blaring big ship horn when a mail involving site comments moderation arrives, as well as a couple of goofy sounds for mails from Josh and Thomas.
When you first launch MailTones it ‘ll ask if you ‘re OK with it sending you push notifications. You ‘ll need to setup mail forwarding on the account you want to use MailTones with to make these work. If you ‘re using Gmail or MobileMe or similar this is very simple. It just requires you to use the ‘forward a copy to ‘ setting and put in the forwarding address given to you within the app. You don ‘t need to share your mail account details in the app or anything similar.
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Please Note: Setting up forwarding of your email is a required part of push setup for this app. For those who have privacy concerns with doing this, there is an FAQ page at Mailtones.net (where mail is forwarded to) that addresses this subject. Check that out HERE. Here ‘s their answer to the main ‘What about privacy? ‘ question:
We do not store any email addresses or message contents, or require your email credentials. Incoming messages are scanned by computer to see if they match your alerts or settings, and then a notification is sent you. We discard your email immediately, so please ensure you are only sending a copy of your messages to your mailtones.net email address.
I may be wrong, but this strikes me as a fairly standard approach on this issue, inline with what Boxcar and other push service providers are doing.
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You can choose to get just the sounds only for new mail or to see alerts as well.
There ‘s not much more to say on this app. It ‘s one of those apps that does something quite simple, but that also has been on iPhone users ‘ wish lists for ages.
It ‘s certainly a keeper for me.
You can grab MailTones in the App Store now, and it ‘s priced at $2.99.
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TAGS: iphone apps
