No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

Ever wanted to send an encrypted message in an email but haven’t wanted the trouble or difficulty of obtaining a digital certificate?

Chibi Ninja, a new app released yesterday, might be for you. It allows you send an encrypted message (and image if you want) through Apple Mail which the recipient can decode using the same password you encrypted it with.

When you launch the app you are presented with its decryption window:

This offers you the choice of one of four encryption standards or ciphers — blowfish 128 bits, cast 128 bits, desx, 192 bits or rc5, 128 bits — for the message and a box to enter your chosen password.

Clicking the Chibi Ninja Mail button opens a message editor in which you compose the message. It allows you to add one image to the message, and to compose mixed messages in English and one other language (currently it supports Bulgarian, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian).

You can also enter a comment to accompany the message that will not be encrypted and auto-generate a password for the message. You will need to send the password that you choose to the recipient. The developer suggests by phone or by hand.

When finished, clicking the editor’s “Create Mail” button launches the encrypted message in a Mail.app email:

Send it and then the recipient can copy the encrypted part to their clipboard, launch Chibi Ninja, enter the password that you sent them and decrypt the message.

Chibi Ninja is cross-platform, which means that this process will work for messasges received on any kind of computer.

Chibi Ninja is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from the developer’s web site.

The Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List grows by another three entries.

I’ve added BuddyPop and Tapdex (two quick access utilities) to the Address Book section.

iCalFix (event alarms by default) was added to the iCal section.

So that’s 103 plugins, addons, scripts and helpful apps for working faster, better, smarter with Mail.app, Address Book and iCal.

Tapdex is a preference pane that enables you to access your Address Book contacts with a user-defined hot key.

Hit your hot key and Tapdex’s search window pops up. Type in the name and the search results narrow in real time until you are presented with the contact you are looking for:

Does this screen remind you of anything? That was my first thought too — BuddyPop.

Tapdex is a “Lite” implementation of BuddyPop. It does not have the rich feature list of BuddyPop (support for Skype, X-Lite and Vonage, Bluetooth SMS, etc) but it is free.

With Tapdex you can launch an email in Mail.app by clicking on the contact’s email address, get a phone number in large type or map an address, which might be all you want to do.

Tapdex is freeware (although there is a USD 5 “Pro” version that removed a small advertisement) and is available from the developer’s web site.

AOL has released the ten most common subject lines in spam emails for 2005.

“Donald Trump” and “penis patch” top the list.

Normally I don’t get to see these due to the efficiency of Mail.app‘s Junk Filter, so the list is news to me (as I hope it is to you):

1. Donald Trump Wants You – Please Respond;
2. Double Standards New Product – Penis Patch;
3. Body Wrap: Lose 6-20 inches in one hour;
4. Get an Apple iPod Nano, PS3 or Xbox 360 for Free;
5. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Lisa, I must have sent you to the wrong site;
6. Breaking Stock News** Small Cap Issue Poised to Triple;
7. Thank you for your business. Shipment notification;
8. Your Mortgage Application is Ready; Thank you:
9. Your $199 Rolex Special Included;
10. Online Prescriptions Made Easy.

Commenting on the overall nature of spam in 2005, AOL postmaster Charles Stiles suggests:

While the volume of spam reaching AOL email inboxes has remained at low levels compared to its height in late 2003, the spam that’s out there is more insidious, crafty, devious, and dangerous than ever.

[Quote via InformationWeek, list via the 168 Media Group. This is an example of attribution, citing the sources for a post. So honourable. So quaint.]

Kevin Gunn posted a simple email address hack for Gmail users.

He discovered that by adding +ebay after your Gmail user name (e.g. steve+ebay@gmail.com) you could create a quick and disposable address for dealing with eBay or Amazon (+amazon) or the Hot Dates service (+hotdates) or whatever.

Replies to these disposable addresses can be marked with a Gmail label on arrival using a filter. This enables you quickly to see all messages relating to a particular service and to track any potential on-selling of your address to spammers while protecting your real email address from abuse.

Simple, flexible, useful. Pretty neat.

After the jump you will find two things that make this an even better idea and one thing that makes it a fairly bad idea.

(more…)

Derek Miller writes about his switch from Entourage to Mail.app. He likes Apple Mail, especially “its generally cleaner interface, quicker searching, and other clever tweaks”.

And he has been quick to discover how its “out-of-the-box” goodness can be further enhanced with plugins, already making use of Mail Stamps, MailTags and Mail Act-on.

He’ll be disappointed in his search for a way to get rules to apply to Sent mail though. A recent thread on the Apple Discussion Board underlines how busted Mail.app is in this regard.

That’s one of my Top Ten reasons by Mail sucks (PowerMail can manage it), but one that didn’t make it onto kill-9.it²‘s list.