Display Unread E-Mail Count on Loginwindow Bit of an unusual case, but I'm planning to restructure how I use OS X when I next do a clean-install, such that I have a separate user account for casual use and work use, to keep things a lot tidier and to avoid distractions.

However, I'd still like to know how many unread messages I have in the other account, either visible from the loginwindow or by some other convenient means.

Is there any way to achieve this, e.g - by installing a script on the account I want to get a count for? Of course if the other account isn't signed in this won't work, in which case a last known count is fine.

I suppose maybe I'm just spoiled by smart phones that let you see message count (or even messages) from a lock-screen, but it'd be nice to have something similar without having to actually add the same e-mail account to Mail for both users.
I think @Buscar웃 is right, you need to fetch your mail before you know how much mail is in your inbox.

I think you can use your Terminal for that, and with the combination of 'GeekBench' it might even look pretty.

A common mailclient for OS X terminal is mail, it is already installed, but unfortunately I have no clue on how to configure it correctly.

Another terminal mail client is mutt. You can install mutt using brew

brew install mutt


You can then configure mutt and run it in your other account. Mutt is lightweight and will not use much resources.