Douglas Bowman at StopDesign has been using Google Calendar for months before its official release.

In a post on his site, he shares thirteen tips for getting the most out of it.

Many of the tips are Mac-specific, ranging from news that the Calendar will soon support Safari to how to smooth the font used for dates. All of them are useful.

If you are a Google Calendar user, you will want to check these out.Google calendar, tips, tricks, mac, safari, productivity

Portable Thunderbird is—as the developers describe it—Thunderbird “packaged so you can carry around with you on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (also on your internal hard disk) as long as it has 33 MB of free space and use on any Mac OS X computer, taking your email, address book and account settings with you.”

The new version updates the mail client to 1.5.0.2 and provides a new icon.

It would be great if an option like this existed for Mail.app. Since it doesn’t, Portable Thunderbird is the next best thing.

It’s freeware and you can get it from FreeSMUG’s portable apps section , also home to things like Portable Gimp, Portable OpenOffice and Portable RSSowl.thunderbird, portable, email, mozilla, flashdrive, usbdrive

Over at orangehat, the poster is dumping Thunderbird for Mail.app. He is throwing off his loyalty to Mozilla, and looking forward to the greater integration Mail offers. Thunderbird he says is “just slightly clunkersville”.

Mike Radomski is surprised to discover that “Mail.app rocks”.

A long-time Lotus Notes user, he recently switched to Mail.app. He was able to connect to his office’s Domino system easily and he is liking what he sees after the switch:

I was delightfully astonished on how more usable my e-mail client became. I can read, sort and search my mail faster and more accurately. I can also switch between accounts with ease.

Mail Act-on and MailTags are supercharging his pleasure.switching, lotus notes, thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, happy users

Event Maker, my favourite app for creating normal and all-day iCal events from Mail.app messages, has been updated.

The new version (0.3b3) has been completely rewritten using Cocoa Bindings and sports a redesigned interface. A Software Update function has been added to the app’s menu.

It also supports iCal’s alarms options. A pop-out alarm drawer has been added which allows you choose an alarm for the event:

Very nice!

The developer Mike Abdullah emailed to let me know about the update and to make a request of Hawk Wings readers:

0.3b3 is currently a “beta” release. This is because I cannot draw and I still need some decent icons for the toolbar! So if you could just mention on your blog that I would really appreciate it if someone were able to spare a little time to help me out.

If you can draw icons and would like to help out with this very useful app, please drop Mike an email.

Event Maker also creates To Dos from email messages, although personally I use MailTags for that.

The new version of Event Maker is available from MacUpdate .mail.app, apple mail, ical, events, todos, alarms, plugins

A research paper by academics from the University of Calgary forecasts the future of spam.

The researchers suggest that new and more sophisticated data mining of saved emails and address book contacts combined with natural language processing techniques will produce zombie PCs that send out emails which look like emails that owner of the PC has written to particular contacts before.

The authors predict that this smarter spam will hard to detect, although they offer a few suggestions on how it might be combatted.

The future of spyware and email worms is also covered.

[Via Slashdot ]spam, email, data mining, spyware, email worms, natural language processing

Gmail+Growl is a plugin for the notification utility Gmail Notifier.

It shows notifications via Growl for new emails delivered to your Gmail account.

Running the app sets the preferences for the alerts:

You can choose to see the Address Book pictures of the senders and to open the email by clicking on the notification with the browser of your choice.

A second pane allows you to customise the content and layout of the alert:

The resulting notifications are pretty and informative:

You need, obviously, to have Gmail Notifier running for this to work.

Gmail+Growl is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .gmail, growl, notification, alerts, plugins, gmail notifier, email

Perhaps it is a personal hang-up. Perhaps Switchers (like reformed smokers) feel more strongly about this than long-term users.

Whatever the cause, somehow it all just feels so very, very wrong:

Click the image for a larger view — if you dare!

Thanks to the wonders of virtualization, I’ve been getting to know Outlook again.

After that, I’ll probably move on and see if anything interesting has happened to PocoMail and PegasusMail , two old-favourites from my Windows days.

Then maybe Evolution on Ubuntu.

All of this is possible through the magic of the latest beta from Parallels Workstation . TUAW has a step-by-step tutorial on how to set it up.

I recommend giving it a try, if only for the nostaliga factor.outlook, virtualization, parallels workstation, Windows XP, pocomail, weird me out, email, mail clients