Andreas Amann, in a comment on an earlier Hotmail entry, makes the following suggestion:

——-

I just tested sending a message to my hotmail (?¢‚Ǩ¬ùspam honey pot?¢‚Ǩ¬ù) account and it arrived just fine (well, in the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìJunk?¢‚Ǩ¬ù folder) even with no priority changes.

Since I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t test this myself, here is something to test – my guess is that hotmail is looking for the X-Priority header for some reason – sending messages as ?¢‚Ǩ?ìNormal?¢‚Ǩ¬ù priority does not add this header in Mail (which is smart). However, you can add this header to all your outgoing messages typing the following in the Terminal (with Mail closed):

This will add a X-Priority header to ALL outgoing messages, ?¢‚Ǩ?ì3?¢‚Ǩ¬? represents ?¢‚Ǩ?ìnormal?¢‚Ǩ¬ù.

I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know whether this works (since I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t get messages not to arrive to my account) by my guess is it should – if you normally don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t use priorities you should be fine (I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know what happens if you set another priority from the UI).

In order to reset this, you would type the following in Terminal:

———-

I tested this and it does work. The benefits of Andreas’ solution are obvious. Having the X-Priority header set at “3″ is not disruptive in any way to non-Hotmail recipients, and it saves you from having to do anything special like remember to carbon copy or select a high or low priority from a drop-down box for emails that are going to Hotmail users.

[Thanks, Brad!].

Andreas Amann has produced an update to his application for switching from Eudora (and Thunderbird and a few other mail clients) to Apple Mail.

The updated version (4.5.1) gains a new feature—it will now preserve message priority flags during conversion—and a host of bugfixes and improvements for existing features. Support for the Japanese version of Eudora is improved in a number of ways. Conversions from Thunderbird to Mail.app are smarter too.

You can find a complete list of the improvements and Eudora Mailbox Cleaner itself on his web site.

George Sudarkoff has written an AppleScript that will announce the name of an email’s sender on its arrival in Apple Mail.

As he says: “It pauses iTunes if it’s playing, speaks the name of the sender if the message is not marked as junk and then resumes the playback.”

The code and instructions for setting this up in Mail.app can be found on his blog, What I Write is What I See .

Yahoo News UK is carrying a story on disappearing messages sent to Hotmail accounts by Apple Mail users.

The article points out that the problem is not restricted to Apple Mail. Customers of several ISPs including Comcast, Rogers and Cogeco are experiencing similar disappearances.

The problem may be due to an overzealous use of spam-filters on Microsoft’s part. Whatever the cause, it seems that no resolution to the problem is in sight.

See also:
Hotmail gives Apple Mail the cold shoulder
“Disappearing Hotmail” work-around #2

According to an article in the New Scientist, Einstein and Darwin handled their correspondence in much the same way as we handle our inboxes today.

Or to put it another way, the arrival of email hasn’t altered patterns of communication and correspondence very much. The research, by a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, Albert-Laszlo Barabosi, suggests a fundamental human pattern of “communication in bursts”:

Both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein relied on pen, paper, and the postal service to communicate with correspondents around the world. But researchers have now found the pattern of their replies is the same as that of computer users answering email today, with both following the same mathematical formula….

These two icons worked in a time when scientific communication was largely by written letter — Darwin sent at least 7591 letters in his career, and Einstein sent 14,500, writing an average of half a letter and one letter per day, respectively.

Yet despite the differences between electronic communication and paper, the same pattern held up — both men answered most of their mail quickly, within about 10 days. But some of the answers took months or even years to send (Nature, vol 437, p 1251). “From the scientific point of view, the interesting thing is that there is a fundamental way that we do things,” Barabosi says.

Hmmm…. “An average of half a letter and one letter per day, respectively”. Maybe something in our patterns of communication has changed after all.

[Via Slashdot, 43Folders.]

Snail Mail is a stand-alone app that addresses and prints envelopes based on the information in your Address Book.

It can print single envelopes or an envelope for every member of an Address Book Group. You also select multiple cards for printing on the fly.

Snail Mail can also print USPS or Australia Post barcodes on its envelopes. Finally, it trumps Address Book in its ability to print address lists.

The envelopes themselves look very good indeed:

You can see why Macworld gave it a four mouse rating.

The app is available from the developer’s web site. Unbelievably, it is free (actually it’s “UNDER”-Ware (“User Now Defines Entity Rights”) but you can read about that in the readme file.)address book, envelopes, usps, Australia post, addresses, productivity, snailmail

In October last year a poster in the macOSXHints forums wrote an AppleScript that backs up selected document and text folders from your Home directory into a zip file and then emails them via Apple Mail to your Gmail account.

Subsequent posters in the thread got all inventive and modified the script in interesting ways.

Then another user posted an AppleScript droplet called “GDrive” which will email any file you drop on it to your Gmail account.

The thread has clocked up over 16,000 views, so perhaps you have read it already. If not, check it out.