At MacWorld, Scott Kelby presents a fistful of Address Book tips from his book Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.

He covers merging duplicate entries for the one contact, map look-ups, a quick link to a Spotlight search on a contact and more.

He also provides a tip for sharing your Address Book. But it requires .Mac accounts, which not everyone has.

If the people who you want to share with are on the same Rendezvous network, there is a better way – check out address-o-sync.

Fastmail, the email service that I use and happily recommend, posted two IMAP bugs in Thunderbird on its blog today:

1. Thunderbird does not set or recognise the /Draft flag on messages saved in IMAP folders. (Bugzilla report.)
2. Thunderbird has big problems handling large attachments saved in messages on IMAP servers. (Report on bleedingedge.com.au and partial fix.)

I post this simply to raise my own morale and the morale of other Mail.app users with IMAP accounts. We do not suffer alone.

Paul Thurrott’s wife is switching to Mac.

This is, of course, big news, because Paul Thurrott is a celebrity in the world of blogging about Windows (see his SuperSite for Windows).

He gave her a Mac mini for Christmas. In a long post he describes the switch.

“Email and calendaring are decidedly more difficult”, he says.

He then explains how easy it was to set up her Hotmail account in Apple Mail, and the painless process of getting her data over with Outlook2Mac despite a large number of archive folders. Admittedly, there were some hiccups with Address Book and iCal. (Should have used ABFiller!).

There are even pictures of the new set-up.

In his “Devil’s Advocate” column at MacObserver, John Kheit reveals just how much information about the files on your computer is stored as metadata in Spotlight’s database and elsewhere.

Did you know, for example, that a metadata record is kept of the location from which you downloaded every file in Safari? This information is not embedded in the file and not sent on when you forward the file, but other kinds of metadata are.

The column details the different types of metadata on your Mac and how to find them, outlines some privacy concerns and provides advice about stripping it before sending files to others.

One solution, he suggests, is to get Mail.app to strip metadata from attachments before sending them.

Potential breaches of privacy and confidentiality are concerns for everyone, not just Windows Vista users.mail.app, apple mail, privacy, metadata, spotlight

The blogger at kill-9.it² lives his “if no one complains, nothing will get better” philosophy by posting “Top 8 reasons why Mail.app sucks”.

WordPress 2.0 was released today.

Heart in mouth, I updated Hawk Wings an hour ago. I can’t believe how smoothly the process went. Mint is working. Plug-ins are working. Everything’s working!

(Not quite everything. ecto won’t work with the new xmlrpc.php file. An ecto for Mac work-around can be found here).

Most of the improvements happen behind the scenes, but Hawk Wings should now be a little quicker to load than it was before. It will be harder to spam the comments.

UPDATE: The developer of ecto has posted a summary of his email exchange with the WordPress team, and provides an xmlrpc.php file from an earlier WP 2.0 beta that works with ecto.

FastScripts is an AppleScript management utility that offers several nifty improvements over the way OS X manages AppleScripts.

The developer Daniel Jalkut has released a new, improved version of FastScripts. It sports a redesigned icon and improved handling of the “close” AppleScript command.

FastScripts is an excellent way to manage and launch the many AppleScripts that make Mail.app faster and better to use.

It offers customisable keyboard shortcuts for launching scripts, smarter switching between apps as a script demands it, configurable menu organisation, better menu shortcuts and more.

All of this for USD 15.

Daniel has also released a slimmed-down freeware version of the app called “FastScripts Lite”. It is missing some features that owners of the shareware version enjoy.

Both are available on his Red Sweater Blog.

Perhaps it’s not too late to point out that FastScripts is Number Eleven on the list of Top Ten Things every Mail.app user should have, even higher if you use AppleScripts a lot.