One of the things that I love most about Apple Mail is the way it displays a picture of the sender at the top of an email. It makes me remember that I am dealing with people. Of course it only does this if you have a picture of the person on their card in your Address Book.

Mail Pictures is a plug-in that extends this personalising touch by adding an “X-Image-Url:” header to your messages. This header points either to your .Mac image or contains an X-Face string generated by dairiki.org’s Online X-Face Converter.

It also allows you to enter raw HTML into your emails via the “Show Options in Compose Window” check-box in the Advanced section of its Preference Pane.

It’s a great idea, but its use seems to have dropped off. Under Panther quite a few people had it installed. I got to see what a lot of people on the Infinite Loop Mailing List look like.

But at one stage (10.4.1?) Tiger disabled all the bundles in Apple Mail and people don’t seem to have reinstalled it. A shame, really, as the ability to put faces to names makes the Apple world a friendlier place.

MailPictures is freeware and can be downloaded from the developer’s web site, nikwest.de.

Justin Blanton has over 22,000 emails in his Mail.app inbox. He wonders if Apple Mail has an upper limit, and has started a competition to discover who has the largest useable (i.e. not archived) mail box.

My largest active mailbox only has 11,682 messages in it, so I won’t win. But you might.

Earlier this year, Merlin Mann posted five tips to increase email productivity on his excellent blog, 43folders.com.

Excellent advice about cheating, writing less and being honest. I probably waste too much time reading productivity tips, but these ones are good. Especially that one about writing less.email, productivity, 43 Folders, tips, writing less, honesty

MacOSXHints has published a useful hint for reading mail more efficiently. Clicking on a URL in Mail opens it in your default browser and brings the browser window to the foreground.

Command-clicking (or holding down the “Apple” key while clicking) on the link makes your browser open the URL in the background, enabling you to read the rest of the email without window shuffling. Clever.

Andreas Amann had updated his collection of Mail Scripts. The new version (2.7.4) fixes a problem in the “Change SMTP Server” script and finds duplicate messages more efficiently. Various issues with Tiger compatibility remain.

MailTags was released today by Scott Morrison, the same developer who brought Mail Act-on to Apple Mail. And the new plug-in is just as good. What Act-on does for sorting, MailTags does for email management.

After you install it, a small tag appears in the top right-hand corner of your emails. Clicking on that opens a pane to the right of the message with a number of options (as you can see in the screenshot). You can specify due dates for any tasks the email might contain, give the email a priority level or add comments. You can also add it to a list of current projects that you can specify in Mail’s Preferences Pane. Also, you can make a donation for the software via PayPal (the developer suggests around $20).

The tags are fully searchable in Spotlight and Mail. You can make smart folders based on the tags, and you can integrate them with Act-on’s rules. You could, for example, create a smart folder based on the ‘due date’ tag that contained all the emails which require a response from you within the next three days.

Used together, Act-on and MailTags bring “power-user” features to Apple Mail that were once the domain of Entourage. Conventional wisdom has it that Apple Mail is only good for email dilettantes. Heavy or professional people need to use Entourage (or so MacWorld likes to claim).

Now Apple Mail users gain some of Entourage’s mail management but without the bloat.

MailTags can be downloaded from Scott’s website and is donationware.

UPDATE: MailTags 1.1 was released on 1 November 2005.

Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts bring powerful additional features to Apple Mail. These nine Apple Scripts (seven for Mail and two for Address Book) allow you to change the SMTP server for multiple accounts on the fly, archive messages more easily, add addresses to Address Book more efficiently, remove duplicate messages and perform other handy tricks like searching Address Book in a more clever way.

Tiger’s Apple Mail has broken a few of these scripts. Andreas provides details on what’s working at the moment under OS X 10.4 and what’s not on his website. Panther and Jaguar users can enjoy the full grunt of the scripts though. Mail Scripts is freeware but donations are welcome.