Talking Mail.app: Fraser Speirs
Fraser Speirs runs Connected Flow 
, the developer of FlickrExport and Xjournal . He’s based in Greenock, Scotland and when not writing software to deal with digital pictures, is usually out taking them.
His first Mac was a Mac Plus in high school, eventually graduating to a Performa 450, a Performa 6400, a G3/266, a dual-500MHz G4, a Quicksilver 800MHz G4 and, today, a 1GHz PowerBook G4. He impatiently awaits the arrival of his Macbook Pro.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
FS: I’ve been using Mail since Mac OS X 10.0 shipped. In the past, I’ve used Claris Em@iler – which I still consider to be the application that took usability to a whole new level on Mac OS – Outlook Express and Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.
I forget exactly why I stopped using Em@iler – I think it had problems on later OSes or something.
I used Mailsmith since it was 1.0, and I still think it has the best implementation of a UI for setting filter criteria that any developer has implemented, anywhere.
The main reason I stopped using Mailsmith was that I discovered IMAP and couldn’t live without it. Mailsmith doesn’t support IMAP and I’m not sure it ever will. I still toy with switching back to Mailsmith, but it’s easy to switch between clients that support IMAP – not so easy to commit to a POP-only client.
After I became an IMAP junkie, I used Outlook Express for a while. On the whole, it wasn’t a bad client.
HW: What plugin and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
FS: I use Mail Act-On all the time, and occasionally install the GPGMail plugin when I go through another spasm of caring about encrypted email.
I have a custom Applescript rule that will notify me via Growl of the subject and sender of any message that doesn’t get filtered. That’s available online at http://speirs.org/wiki/Scripts .
I also make heavy use of Textpander to fill in parts of messages or to send quick responses to FAQs in support email for my software. I also use it to sign off emails in different ways. I always use a period at the start of any abbreviation to avoid it conflicting with regular typing.
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
FS: Far and away, it’s Spotlight searching. The integration of Mail and Spotlight pretty much justifies the Tiger upgrade for me – the rest is just an added bonus. My basic folder arrangement is one folder for each mailing list, an @Action folder and an @Saved folder. List mail lives in its own box but everything else goes into @Saved or Trash. When I need anything, I just search for it.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
FS: I have a couple. Primarily, it’s that I want a rule editor that’s as good as Mailsmith’s and allows more than just “Match {any, all} of the following:” – I often want “this and not that” kind of rules. I’d also like to be able to match on more things, such as “number of recipients is…”.
I also rather wish that Mail would just append the signature when the message is sent, rather than when the compose window is opened, but that’s a minor point.
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
FS: I’d tell them to focus on making it easy for third party developers to integrate with Mail. This means everything from documenting the plugin API to making it possible to drag a message to another application and have some method of linking the two. There is *so much* demand for this and for other applications to integrate with Mail.
Secondly, I’d tell them not to be discouraged by the negativity that sometimes surrounds their product on the Mac web.
You can read more from Fraser at LiveJournal and on his wiki . He also writes for MacDevCenter .
Similar Posts:
- Fraser Speirs’ Growl AppleScript
- Mail.app: When the love fades…
- Script to export email from Mailsmith
- Quicksilver and Yojimbo 1.2
- Talking Mail.app: John Gruber
Tags: Apple Mail, dislikes, fraser speirs, growl, likes, plugins, talking mail.app
