At the moment I’m using the excellent Pomodoro application on my Mac for tracking all my pomodoros during the day. While it already supports changing your Adium/Skype status to DND with a custom message during a pomodoro I also wanted to suppress Outlook “new mail” notifications.
Fortunately Pomodoro supports executing AppleScript scripts for certain events so I used the following snippets to enable/disable these Outlook notifications:
Disable on start/resume:
tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
set display alerts to false
set play sound on new message to false
end tell
Enable on end/reset:
tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
set display alerts to true
set play sound on new message to true
end tell
It’s working great so far.