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!

Tags: Apple Mail, mail.app, Preferences

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This entry was posted on Monday, 31st October, 2005 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Apple Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.