Change the Dock icon in Apple's Mail.app

Bruce McLaughlin tried pasting a new icon into the Mail.app in MacOS X. After logged out and back in (or you can relaunch the Finder), the new icon showed up. However, once he received a new email the dock icon changed to the original icon with the red notification badge. Here's how to change the icon and make it stick with the addition of the badge.

Pasting the icon into the Inspector Window doesn't work. You need to change the app.icns file in the Mail.app package. Make a copy of the Mail.app and Control-click on the program to bring up the "Show Package Contents" selection. Navigate your way to the Contents-->Resources folder and replace the app.icns with any icon in the new 'data-fork only' MacOS X format. If you use Iconographer, this is the "MacOS X New" format.

For extra credit, you can even change the red badge. Look at the four "newMailBadg.tiff" images in the same folder. They vary in size to accommodate message numbers as high as 1000. (That's a lot of email!). If you make new badges, send them to ResExcellence and we'll post them.