This widget checks your Apple Mail account every time Dashboard is activated without having Apple Mail running all the time. It is able to check all your POP, IMAP, Exchange and .Mac accounts. Unlike other widgets MailWidget knows which mail from your POP account has been received in Apple Mail. That’s especially interesting for those who do not have an IMAP account and therefore are not deleting their old mail from the POP mail server immediately in order to be able to read their last mails on travels via webmail.

Other widgets would say something like “there are 88 eMails on the mail server” but only MailWidget will tell if there are new eMails that doesn’t have been already received by Apple Mail.