Robert Daeley at O’Reilly’s macdevcenter has written an AppleScript that will give you notification of new mail in Mail.app by playing your choice of song in iTunes.

He provides instructions on how to modify the script to specify the song, the playlist, and the start and end point in the track.

The script is then linked to a rule in Apple Mail.

Is this a good idea? Not in my house, but it might be in yours.

UPDATE: And as TUAW sensibly points out, you can do something very like this through Apple Mail’s Preferences without needing to enter the fraught world of applescript at all.

Joe Kissell’s ebook on Mail 2.0 has been released!

This is the only book available on Apple Mail in Tiger and it’s excellent. Based on Joe’s earlier book on Mail.app in Panther, it has been revised and expanded to cover all the new features in Mail 2.0.

Read it to learn tips for importing email, how to fix damaged mailboxes and more. Discover seven key bits of advice about rules, five ways to improve the Previous Recipients list used for spam filtering and address completion, and six suggestions for Spotlight-enabled smart mailboxes.

Get under the hood of Mail.app and come to grips with the different ways in which POP and IMAP accounts work, their advantages and drawbacks, and how Apple Mail implements them. I have never read a clearer explanation. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

I was lucky enough to read it in final draft form, on the basis of alleged “technical expertise”, but I learnt far more from the book than I could offer.

Don’t buy yet another hand-tooled crocodile skin, rhinestone and spandex cover for your iPod gizmo. Buy this. If you are an Apple Mail user, there is no smarter way to spend USD 10.

Check it out (even read a free 33 page preview) on the Take Control web site.

Pod2Go is an app that allows you to sync your Mail.app messages (and lots of other things) to any iPod except the shuffle.

A new version has been released with a number of improvements, including the ability to sync with iCal better and to import news feeds from NetNewsWire. You can read the full changelog here.

Pod2Go costs USD 12 and is available from the developer’s web site.

GoogleFill is an Address Book plug-in that performs a reverse look-up via Google for any telephone number in your Address Book.

If it finds it, it presents you with the following dialog box, allowing you to insert the address into your contact’s card:

This will only work with US telephone numbers. If I lived in the US I would probably use this a lot.

GoogleFill is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site.

The 10.4.3 upgrade broke the httpmail plug-in for some people. A new version of the plug-in, which allows users to download their MSN and Hotmail emails into Apple Mail, has been released which fixes the problems some people were reporting.

And even if it doesn’t, a user has posted a work-around on httpmail’s Sourceforge bugs report page:

If 10.4.3 isn’t letting you install the plugin fill in all the details as usual but when you get to the incoming server box (normally where it freezes up) just enter hotmail and NOT hotmail.com click continue a warning will come up disregard and continue. When you have filled out all the details go into the preferences in mail to edit your hotmail account an just change the incoming server to hotmail.com and that’s it.

You can get the new version from its Sourceforge page.

Christopher Biagini at Assorted Geekery has written an extensive review of what he considers credible alternatives to Mail.app. It’s not easy for these apps, he says:

It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s tough to compete with an app that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s bundled with the OS, so each of these guys know that they have to bring something special to the table in order to get people to switch.

Mailsmith has BBEdit?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s text-fu magic, GyazMail pimps its Cocoa-ness, and Thunderbird rocks extensibility and cross-platform goodness.

But for Christopher, Apple Mail rises to the top. There is only “one email client to rule them all”.

It is possible — after all — to sign .Mac emails with the new iChat digital certificate that came with the 10.4.3 update.

Although I couldn’t get it to work, some people like David Dunham were able to use their new iChat digital certificates to sign .Mac emails. And it looked like Apple had future plans to use the certificate for email signatures.

But you can use it now to sign your .Mac emails.

To enable Mail.app to use your iChat certificate in this way, you need to open the Keychain Access utility. You can find it in the Utilities sub-folder of your Applications folder.

Make sure that your .Mac digital certificate is listed there. Then open up Keychain Access’ Preferences and select the “Search .Mac for certificates” option:

Now launch or (re-launch) Apple Mail. It will be able to digitally sign emails composed in your .Mac account using that certificate.

Works for me!

UPDATE: Criss Hyde emails to say that this certificate support is not there for trial .Mac accounts or email only .Mac accounts. But full .Mac accounts and family .Mac accounts are supported.

[Via Quarter Life Crisis]