At Betalogue, Pierre Igot reports two more annoyances in Apple Mail:

1. Mail 2.0: ?¢‚ǨÀú0 messages, 3 unread?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ — By doing several complicated things at once, he brings Mail.app‘s multi-threading ability to its knees.

   It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be so hard to discover that the app has stalled and it shouldn’t be so difficult to unstick it.

   This leads to some reflections on how Mail.app might be better designed so that things like this are more transparent for average users.

2. Mail 2.0: ?¢‚ǨÀúUndo Mark as Junk?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t undo anything — Pierre has an email incorrectly-marked as Junk. If the Junk filter is on automatic, it will move the message to the Junk folder.

   But going to the Junk folder and selecting the message to “un-junk it”, he notes that clicking the “Undo Mark as Junk” option in the Edit menu or selecting “Mark as Not Junk” from the Message menu doesn’t do anything.

   I can’t reproduce this behaviour. When I do this, the message does get “un-junked”. And I guess that Apple Mail’s Spam database is updated in the background, but I agree it would be useful if Mail.app automatically restored the message to the mailbox from whence it came. (like Entourage does…Grrrr!!)

As always, excellent holiday reading!

By default, the Address Book Dashboard widget uses MapQuest to look up and display a map for the location of your contacts.

Rob Griffiths (of macOSXHints fame) provides a script and walk-through on MacWorld that will replace the MapQuest look-up with Google Maps, giving you pop-up balloons and all the other Google Map goodness.

I am not much of a widget man myself. I prefer to use the plug-ins for Address Book itself — Brian Toth’s Google Maps plug-in and UK Streetmaps.

But widget nuts will love Rob’s tip.

In a follow-up to his excellent “Making Mac Mail Work for You” article on LowEndMac, Ed Eubanks publishes some feedback from the original article.

One of the user comments contained a tip that was news to me: how to set a default email address for an Address Book contact.

The answer is tucked away in a submenu. In Address Book select “Edit Distribution List…” from the Edit menu.

You will be presented with a screen like this:

Selecting an email address from the list next to each contact turns it bold. That address becomes the default one for Mail.app, but only when the contact is selected as part of an Address Book Group. mail.app, apple mail, address book, contacts, default, email address

Mail.app‘s Junk filter is not a Bayesian one like the spam catching technology in SpamSieve and many other spam-fighting apps. Instead it uses a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).

I’ve blogged two excellent descriptions of the way this filter works in Apple Mail before, but today came across a third explanation with the imposing title, “Bayesian Nets, Latent Semantics, Despamming and other speculations”.

The post describes the differences between Bayesian and LSA and a whole lot more. It’s over two years old, but a good read and packed full of links to other resources on spam.

[via Paul's Time Sink.]spam, bayesian filtering, Latent Semantic Analysis, LSA, mail.app, apple mail, junk filter

A tip on macOSXHints links to an AppleScript that removes duplicate events from iCal.

This is particularly useful for people who sync their calendars with Palm devices, a process that often causes duplicates.

The actual macOSXHints tip tells you how to delete duplicated fields in Address Book and iCal, something that can occur in the rare case of people who use The Missing Sync application and Tiger’s Sync Services.