This quick little hack adds “Apply”, “Cancel” and “OK” buttons to the bottom of every pane in Mail.app‘s Preferences.

With these buttons added, you no longer need to close Preferences or switch panes in order to save your changes.

By default, a Preference pane looks like this:

To add the buttons,

1. Quit Mail
2. Navigate to Mail.app in your Applications folder, Control-Click on it and select “Show Package Contents”
3. Inside the Finder window that then opens, double-click on the Contents and then the Resources folders.
4. Open the PreferencesPanels.plist file with a text editor like TextEdit or with the Property List Editor if you have the Developer Tools installed.
5. Find the “UseButtons” string and change its value from 0 to 1. Then save.

Close everything again and open Apple Mail. You will see that your Preference Panes now look like this:

Handy!

A company called duhsoft has produced a widget that claims to send emails even if you have no access to an email server.

Here’s the (slightly curious) pitch:

miniMail’s zero configuration design is an excellent resource when you need to send a text email. Even if your email account doesn’t support POP, miniMail will work for you. All you need is access to the internet.

And here’s what it looks like:

I’ve only got one question: Why?

P.S. A comment on MacUpdate suggests that it may not work and raises another interesting possible use for the widget.

Half the fun of running a blog is looking at the stats it generates — where people come from, what they look at while they are here, what browsers they are using.

Normally one would only mention that in small, infrequent statistical celebrations, but I was looking at the stats for searches on the blog today and noticed two things:

• The most common search term over three months is not Apple Mail or Mail.app or IMAP lock-ups or iPod or restoring lost mail. It is, you guessed it, Gmail.
• A few people, or maybe one determined person, are/is searching for “AOL IMAP path prefix”. As far as I know, you don’t need one, and the Unofficial AOL FAQ for IMAP in Apple Mail thinks so too.

There were eight searches just for “goodness“. That’s what I like about Mac users. They’re such nice people!

An Australian company has launched “Remember the Milk”, an online “To Do list” service that integrates with iCal and offers the ability to create and share To Do lists, to get reminders via email, AIM or SMS and a raft of other Web 2.0-type features.

Although still in Beta, the service also allows you to email reminders about unfinished tasks to other Contacts (this appeals to me immensely!), add list items via email and subscribe to your To Do list as an RSS feed.

It features full International support for timezones and languages and is absolutely free.

Full of GTD promise. Very cool. Check it out.

ZDNet has a news story explaining some of the tech behind the project and the creators’ Web 2.0 vision.

Over the weekend a German Mail.app user posted a very odd problem in the forums at MacUser.de.

After trying out Apple Mail for the first time, he found that he could send and receive mail OK, but he couldn’t type anything in the message field of a new email.

Not only that, his Compose window looked quite unusual, with a severely truncated Account selection drop-down menu:

Numerous suggestions were made — Had he entered his account details properly, entered an SMTP server, repaired Permissions, deleted his account and re-entered the details, entered his username properly? — all to no avail.

Finally, running the 10.4.2 Combo update fixed the problem.

The cause? An incompatible version of PGP (Version 8). Perhaps.

The moral? Disabling third-party software or add-ons is a good trouble-shooting step. Always.

iPod It allows you to transfer your PIM data to your iPod so it’s available to read whenever you need it. It supports the transfer of information from Entourage and Stickies, as well Mail, Address Book and iCal.

It also allows you to download RSS feeds, weather forecasts and news headlines directly to your iPod. A screenshot of its main window shows just how much stuff it allows you to transfer:

You can automate the syncing of your information by choosing to synch on launch and automatically exit afterwards and/or sync the information manually.

All versions of the iPod and iPod mini software are supported.

iPod It was updated today. The new version, 2.5.2, identifies Apple Mail mailboxes by account name and well as mailbox name, so that you can easily identify the mailboxes for particular accounts after the transfer. It also improves Event and Contact handling with Entourage 2004 SP2.

iPod It is shareware (USD 14.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.

But before you buy, check out the other applications that transfer Mail.app‘s messages to your iPod: Pod2Go (slightly cheaper at USD 12) and MailToPod (even cheaper, USD 10) which doesn’t yet work with Tiger, but soon will.

So many notification options exist for Apple Mail — “loud” ones like iAlert or MailAppetizer, discreet ones like MailUnreadStatusBar, spoken ones like the Announce Mail or Spoken Sender Applescripts — that it is possible to overlook Mail’s built-in notification features.

Mail.app can announce new mail with an audio file that you can configure yourself in the General tab of the Preferences pane.

It can also let you know that new mail has arrived by bouncing its icon in the Dock. You can easily activate this by setting up this rule:

Apple Mail doesn’t have a rule condition called “Message is not Junk” that would prevent the icon bouncing for Junk. If you know how to do this in a smarter way, let me know.

If the sight of anything at all bouncing in the Dock annoys you, you can disable attention-seeking icon bouncing permanently with Insanity’s free Dock Detox haxie, which requires Insanity’s APE to run.bonucing icon, dock, apple mail, mail.app, notification, rule