David Chartier at TUAW reports on the weird situation that arises when you try to sync settings on two or more Macs when more than one has Mail.app set to use random signatures.

This situation sends iSync into an endless loop of error messages, that can only terminated by syncing the computers with Apple Mail active on only one of the Macs.

Ever wondered whether the US Government is reading your emails as part of its relentless war on terror?

Boing Boing provides a set of instructions on how to set up a “honey pot” to determine if your email is being snooped.

It makes for an interesting read, even if you have no intention of actually trying it out.

Three new additions to the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List bring the total number of plugins, addons, scripts and helpful apps for working with Mail.app to an even 100:

1. Remove Duplicate Events was added to the iCal section.
2. Address-o-sync (syncing Address Books over a network) to the Address Book section.
3. Service Scrubber was added to the Miscellaneous (helpful apps) section.

Merry Christmas!

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