Hawk Wings reader Allan emails to ask if there is a simple way in Mail.app to forward the HTML eNewsletters he sometimes gets to other people.

You would think so. It’s a fairly common task. It’s the kind of information-sharing and communication that the Internet and email are supposed to provide.

But there isn’t.

There is, however, a work-around for this using the “Re-direct option”.

This works, but has a downside. The email will appear in the recipient’s Message List as coming from the original sender, although the first header in the Preview Pane clearly says, “Resent-From: [Your name]”.

Otherwise you need to use the same work-arounds as you use to compose true HTML emails in Mail.html, enewsletters, mail.app, apple mail, forwarding, redirect, composing, tips

Webmonkey has published the introductory chapter to PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid by Michael W. Lucas.

It covers Phil Zimmermann’s first steps with PGP, the lawsuits with the US Government, the launch of OpenPGP, GnuPG, legal aspects of encryption and more.

A brief quotation:

The ideas behind PGP had been known and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians for years, so the underlying concepts weren’t truly innovative. Zimmermann’s real innovation was in making these tools usable by anyone with a home computer. Even early versions of PGP gave people with standard DOS-based home computers access to military-grade encryption.

UPDATE: Mirko posts a link in the comments to an audio interview with Jon Callas , CTO at PGP Corporation, who also explains the history of PGP. Thanks.pgp, gpg, encryption, privacy, Zimmermann, OpenPGP, GnuPG, history

GoogleFill is a plugin for Address Book that allows you to search Google for addresses that match any phone number in your Address Book.

For example, your mobile / cell phone offers the option to add the phone numbers of callers to your phone’s address book. The next time you sync your phone and Mac OS X Address Book, the number shows up in without any other information.

If you have this plugin installed, you can then right click on the number and select “Autofill from Google for”:

It then heads off to search Google. Wen it finds a match, if offers a confirmation dialog:

An updated version (1.1) released today is smarter about matching the phone numbers and is also a universal binary.

GoogleFill is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, contacts, phone numbers, addresses, Google, autofill, universal

MailAnnounce is an AppleScript that announces the sender and subject of new emails.

Damon Parker has updated the script so that it now skips read messages more reliably and is smarter about dealing with “Re:”.

It doesn’t run on Intel Macs.

You can download the updated version from his site applescript, notification, plugins, helpful apps, spoken announcement, mail.app, apple mail

The text editor TextMate comes bundled with an “Edit in TextMate” input manager which allows you to call Textmate as an external editor in Cocoa apps.

If you select the Install “Edit in TextMate”… action located in your TextMate bundle (using the gear menu in the status bar), you will get a full explanation and a button that creates the required symbolic link for you.

Then, when you want to write a reply or compose a new message in Mail.app, just hit the keyboard shortcut and get to work:

When you are done, Command-S saves your work and inserts it in the message:

I have also found this useful when working in other apps. For example, if you are editing a 37Signals Writeboard , Command-Shift-S offers you a quick way to save your work off as a text file on your hard drive.

UPDATE: The TextMate people picked up this post on their own blog and offer some extra nifty tips on how to get the most out of TextMate as an external editor in Mail.

[From the TextMate mailing list and Manual ]textmate, mail.app, apple mail, cocoa, external editor, writeboard, tips

JABMenu is a utility that offers easy and quick access to your Address Book contacts from the menubar.

Selecting each kind of data from the drop-down menu executes a user-specified action — a new email from an email address, a map look-up from a postal address and so on.

An updated version released today offers many improvements, including significantly faster launching and searching.

It now contains support for contact URLs and notes, improved handling of international address formats and more options for handling groups.

It also expands the number of map services you can select by default, offering the choice of Expedia, Google, MapQuest, Maps, MSN or Yahoo.

The Entourage version has also been updated.

JABMenu is shareware (USD 10) and is available from the developer’s web site .Address Book, contacts, menubar, map lookups, groups

Apart from trying to work out what optimisation is, a second reason for the brief posting break is the arrival of my new MacBook Pro. Gee willikers, it’s fast!

And quiet too. I was scared off buying one earlier by Daniel Jalkut’s series of posts about his hyper-noisy MacBook Pro.

Fortunately, this one has a serial number beginning with W8615****, which tells me that it was made in the fifteenth week of 2006 and that it contains the updated “Revision D” logic board that fixes the problems. And so it does. (Fingers crossed!)

Just a few “real-life” stats: My old 1 GHz, 1 GB RAM 15″ PowerBook takes 10 seconds from the launch of Mail until the end of the initial mail-check. This 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM 15″ MacBook Pro takes 5 seconds. The old one took 23 seconds to search for “hippopotamus” in the entire message in every folder; this one takes 7 seconds.

Repairing permissions on the old one took 118 seconds for a 54GB hard drive. This one does 92GBs in 62 seconds. I’m a happy boy.

[Thanks, Wifey]macbook pro, ahhh lovely, lovely