Next month will mark two years since I “switched” to using a Mac. When I switched, two things helped me make the transition — a friendly Apple user forum and David Pogue’s “Mac OS X : The Missing Manual, Tiger Ed” (of course, it was the Panther edition back then).

For a friendly user forum you can’t beat Whirlpool.net.au’s Apple Forum. That’s where I learnt how to get my mail over from Windows to Apple, read about the pros and cons of the various email clients for Apple and got help on the rare occasions that I was able to bust things.

Apple’s own discussion board for Apple Mail is, of course, also excellent. A number of very knowledgeable and friendly people answer questions there.

David Pogue’s book is terrific value for money. It not only teaches you all about the new operating system, its chapter on Apple Mail tells all you need to know to get started (plus a new things that are good to know after you’ve started). I highly recommend it.

SAMS Publishing has put the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìApple Mail?¢‚Ǩ¬ù chapter of Mac OS X Tiger Unleashed (2005) by William and John Ray online. It’s a good read.

If you just want to get started as fast as you can, then you can always use the Apple Mail 101 Resources on the Apple web site.

Getting your head around the new software is one thing. Moving your mail over from Outlook or whatever PC client you used is another. You can read some tips about how to do that here and here.

I’d love to work in Apple Mail all day, but sometimes I need to take a break for word-processing, web browsing or blogging. Mail Appetizer is for those moments. Other notification add-ons (like MailUnreadStatusBar) will tell you discreetly in the menubar how many emails are waiting for you. Mail Appetizer takes a bolder approach. Whenever Apple Mail is not the active app, it brings your email to you in a splash screen as it arrives. Here is an example:

This plug-in installs itself in the the Preferences pane of Apple Mail. You can configure the mailboxes that it watches, the fonts it uses, the level of transparency in the notification window, and so on. The splash window itself can be re-sized, and contains four little icons at the bottom enabling you to view the message in Mail, mark it as read, delete it or dismiss the window.

Some people say that productivity is enhanced by limiting the number of times that you check your email. Once every hour, or every thirty minutes, they say. This plug-in won’t help you achieve that!

It is free (donations welcome!) and you can download it from the Bronson Beta web site.plugin, addon, mail.app, apple mail, notification, mailappetizer, alerts, smoked glass, productivity

A Mac user in Holland has discovered that limited Boolean searching is “hidden” in Spotlight. As you might expect, the syntax is as follows:

“lenin stalin” – as we all know – finds things containing lenin and stalin
“lenin|stalin” will find things mentioning lenin or stalin
“lenin|stalin(-trotsky)” will find things containing lenin or stalin but not mentioning trotsky.

Neat!

And, of course, it works in Apple Mail as well, where the search function uses the Spotlight technology.

Or you can use this syntax:

A & B yields A AND B
A | B yields A OR B
A ! B yields A NOT B.

See more at his blog, ipse dixit, and in the tip and comments at MacOSXHints.

Further to the tip on cleaning out obsolete files from your Mail folder, the newest version of Onyx automates this process. And it seems to do it better. Running the “clean obsolete files” option this morning reduced my Mail folder further from 355 MB to 322 MB. I guess it found files that I overlooked when I cleaned the folder out manually using the Apple tech note. It will also clean out your Mail attachments folder.

Of course, Onyx does more than this. Its creator describes it as “a maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility. It also makes it possible to configure certain hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, and Safari, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, preview the different logs and CrashReporter, and more.”

It’s free, and you can download it from the Titanium Software web site.

A new plug-in for Mail that stores and indexes iChat logs within Mail, so that you can search them together with your emails. It offers two definite advantages over trying to find your chat logs with Spotlight:

(i) Spotlight can find your chats, but lists them in the results window under the “Other” category, along with all your iCal appointments, plist files, .info files and other miscellaneous things that it can’t find another home for. You can spend a lot of time scanning through the results to find what you need. Chatalog finds only chats. Installing it brings all your communications with others, by email or iChat, under one roof.

(ii) Chatalog also indexes separately all the links and images that you have sent or received in your chats. You know that you sent a really interesting link to a friend your were iChatting with in London, but now you can’t find it. Chatalog can. And quite quickly too.

It also compiles statistics on your chat logs, how many words sent and received (are you a talker or a listener?), average number of words per chat, total number of swearwords, and so on. If you agree with Aristotle that “an unexamined life is not worth living”, then Chatalog is for you!

Among other improvements, the new version (1.2) features a widget and an archiver to help with the importing of existing iChat logs.

I don’t chat enough to make this one of my “always on” plug-ins, like Mail Act-on or MailUnreadStatusBar. But if I did, it would be a favourite. Good idea. Nicely executed. It’s shareware (USD 12.95 for personal use, USD 24.95 for businesses) and you can download it from the FreeVerse web site.

Updated 29 September 2005

Everyone’s talking about it, so why not join in? Mail Act-on is everyone’s plug-in of the moment. Reviews on 43 Folders, MacOSXHints, About.com, Amit Gupta’s Blog and MacWorld rave about the time it saves and the neatness it brings to your inbox.

Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do – moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.

Some reviewers recommend combining its use with a “Respond-Action-Hold-Waiting-Archive” schema of folders for sorting mail and getting über-efficient. That’s not for me. I soon forget about the emails I moved into the Action folder, or worry about which of the folders a particular email should be in. But even without this extra step, my inbox is smaller and I deal with things faster.

Mail Act-on is free, although the creator, Scott Morrison, accepts donations. You can download it from his web site.mail act-on, scott morrison, filing, email, rules, plugin, keyboard shortcut, mail.app, apple mail

One way to solve the broken hyperlinks annoyance in Apple Mail 2.0 is to make your URLs and hyperlinks so short that they can’t break. A free service on the web called TinyURL can help you do this. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to the TinyURL web site – http://tinyurl.com.
2. Find the link to the little javascript applet on the front page which looks like this

onto the bookmarks bar of your browser (Safari in my case) like this:

3. Now whenever you want to send the hyperlink of a page you are browsing, click on the bookmark and it launches a new window with a short URL. For example, say you found a great tip for working around the broken hyperlink problem in Apple Mail. You click on the bookmark and it turns this URL

http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/08/08/broken-hyperlinks-work-around/

into this:

http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw

4. Cut and paste, or drag-and-drop the short URL – http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw (it does work. Click it and see!) – into your Mail message and you are done.

Now everyone can click on the links you send with ease. It’s not elegant, it’s not transparent, but it does work!broken hyperlinks, URLs, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, workarounds, tinyURL