Grazing the web over the last few days, I came upon a MacFixit piece on trying to get around the Apple mail sound bug. If you're a Mail user, there's a good chance you have run into it. Incoming mail fails to sound a beep, so you finally get a look at mail and see dozens of emails have come in while the Mac remains mute. I complained about this more than a year ago, but still nothing from Apple.
There have been dozens of articles talking about this, and the Apple support boards have a lot of users