Receiving visual notifications even when Mathematica is minimized?

Question

How to receive visual notifications on screen during long computation even when Mathematica is minimized? Question is similar to this: How to make the Mathematica icon flash in the taskbar?.

MessageDialog[] (or anything similar) would be great but I don't know how to force it to appear on screen when Mathematica is minimized. Solution would be if with some command Mathematica could be automaticaly maximized but I couldn't find how to do it neither.

Alternatives: Beep[] is not an option for me because I keep sound turned off, besides I could easily miss the beep when I leave computer for a moment. SendMail[] overall is an option. In fact, it works very well for me when I'm not at home. But when I'm sitting at my computer I want to receive instant message on screen.

I'm using Mathematica 9 on Windows.

Answer 1

Actually MessageDialogdoes appear even if Mathematica is minimized.

Other MS Windows only solutions:

Alert[S_String] := Module[
  {filename = FileNameJoin[{$TemporaryDirectory, "MmaAlert.vbs"}]},
  Export[
   filename,
    StringJoin["msgbox \"", S, "\", 0, \"Message from Mathematica\""],
    "String"];
  SystemOpen[filename];
  ]

Alert["Time for tea"]

or simply

Alert2[S_String] := Run["cmd /C msg * " <> S]