Mail Pictures
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.
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September 25th, 2005 at 1:26 am
[...] Developers have tried to replace these missing features — iSay and MailVoiceClip for LipService, MailPriority for read receipts (doesn’t work in Tiger), MailPictures for X-images-URL and pictures of senders not in your Address Book — but the decision to remove them in the first place is puzzling. [...]
September 29th, 2005 at 10:57 am
[...] Die-hard hand-coders can enter raw HTML into emails - or cheat a bit by importing raw HTML from another editor - using the MailPictures plug-in. Checking the “Show options in compose window” in the Advanced section of the Mail Pictures Preference Pane enables this. [...]
October 12th, 2005 at 3:33 pm
[...] Composing was more awkward because of the limitations of the Rich Text editor in Apple Mail. Using the “Message is raw HTML” option provided by the MailPictures plug-in, I was able to cut and paste the HTML, send and receive a message that was rendered in just the same way. The underlying HTML code was also the same. [...]
November 12th, 2005 at 9:41 am
[...] Die-hard hand-coders can enter raw HTML into emails - or cheat a bit by importing raw HTML from another editor - using the MailPictures plug-in. Checking the “Show options in compose window” in the Advanced section of the Mail Pictures Preference Pane enables this. [...]
December 14th, 2005 at 9:04 am
[...] If you really have to do this, MailPictures is the way to go, in my view. Technorati Tags: HTML, Mail.app, MailPictures [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 9:48 am
[...] MailPictures is one of my favourites. [...]