Tonight I stumbled across a newly-posted Gmail icon at InterfaceLIFT.

The set contains images for the back and front of an envelope, the front displaying a possibly recognisable address.

This may be especially of interest to people looking for an icon to use with Michael McCracken’s excellent dedicated WebKit Gmail browser, although people who use Gmail for their email but Mail.app to read and collect it might be tempted too.

As usual, you can use these instructions to replace the icon in either the WebKit browser or Mail.app.gmail, Google, mail.app, apple mail, icons, hacks, productivity, email, webkit

About a month ago, Hawk Wings received its first donation from a reader.

I have since been trying to persuade him to tell me something about how he uses Mail.app and what he likes and dislikes about it so that I could offer a little profile with the news, but he has proved too shy or too busy to give me anything.

This is all I know: Eelco is a Dutch reader who made a kind donation to Hawk Wings and wants me to “Keep up the great work!”. Thanks, Eelco. I really appreciate your generosity and good wishes.

Of course, Eelco doesn’t have to feel all alone. You could make a donation too, using the PayPal button on the site’s front page in the sidebar to the right of screen.

In fact, if you read Hawk Wings a lot and like the blog’s style and content — a casserole of Mail.app, Address Book, iCal and email in general, spiced with pinches of Gmail and Thunderbird and a productivity jus — and your email life has got better because of it, maybe you should donate.

It would encourage me to continue blogging Hawk Wings, especially now that people are throwing pots of money at me to write about other things.

I should mention too that Hawk Wings received a very kind donation from a scotch-drinking, bearded developer from northern climes some time ago, but he is not a reader; he is one of my teachers.

Also, three developers gave me free registrations for apps that I posted about on Hawk Wings. Which was nice. Thanks.hawk wings, donations, reader support, being thankful, paypal, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, productivity, gmail

Hawk Wings reader Leonardo Burci emailed today to tell me something about Address Book and Mail.app that I didn’t know.

He writes:

Create a Group in Address Book. Add people containing valid e-mail addresses plus a person without an e-mail address or with an invalid e-mail address.

Create a new email. Choose your Group as recipient. Send. You get an error saying something like “mail could not be sent using server xyz, etc”. It doesn’t tell you the real reason why the email couldn’t be sent. It should.

Problem: a Group in the Address Book might consist of people and companies with and without e-mail addresses. This group might be used for sending letters, faxes and e-mail. Mail.app should handle such a recipient list intelligently.

Solution: Mail.app should inform the user about missing and invalid e-mail addresses and should give the user a choice whether to send the mail to the recipients with correct e-mail addresses or not. If you do send, it should give the user a list of people and companies that have no or invalid e-mail addresses and that were therefore excluded.

He’s right. This is not the behaviour of an Operating System that “just works”.address book, mail.app, apple mail, groups, error message, invalid email addresses, bugs

At CNet, lawyer Eric J. Sinrod is astounded by the things that people still write in emails.

Despite several high-profile cases, many continue to commit things to email—a lasting, storable medium—that would make a more prudent person flinch.

He recalls the antitrust case against Microsoft in the late 1990s in which “Attorneys for the Department of Justice skillfully used Gates’ own e-mails against him to paint Microsoft’s co-founder as a predatory monopolist.”

In more current affairs, US public service employee David Safavian will be proved guilty on the basis of his own emails alone, according to the Department of Justice.

He has a theory about why unguarded practices continue:

E-mail has become ubiquitous. Very busy people often send and receive e-mail messages more than they actually talk to others. E-mail thus becomes a substitute for conversation. Writers of e-mail messages become very comfortable and chatty, forgetting or not appreciating that the e-mail messages live on.

Most of us don’t play for the same stakes as Bill Gates or David Safavian.

If we followed Sinrod’s advice only to write emails that could happily appear on the front page of a newspaper we would die of boredom by a thousand cuts before ever ending up in trouble, but some caution never goes astray.

And, really, the rules are pretty simple. Don’t send an email or operate heavy machinery of any kind when you are angry. Keep slanderous gossip about workmates out of your email. Restrict it to the water-cooler where it belongs. Leave your feelings about your boss with your therapist and not in your Sent Mail folder. That kind of thing.

Of course, you are already doing that, aren’t you?email, bill gates, safavian, prudence, keeping it nice, evidence, self-incrimination

Clipboard extenders, which save your recent clipping and copying history, are a great way to boost your productivity and reduce the amount of switching around you need to do from one window to the next.

JumpCut, CuteClips, CopyPaste+yType all do this job well, as do Quicksilver and Butler which have clipboard or pasteboard histories.

PopCopy takes a slightly different approach. It lives in the Menubar, where it displays the title of the most recent clip.

When you click on the title, it launches a drop-down menu listing all the most recent clips. (The demo is limited to five clips):

However, it can also be activated with a hotkey (Command-Shift-V by default), which produces a pop-up dialog:

Hitting the hotkey again cycles through the list of stored clips, until you find the one you want.

PopCopy is shareware, like CuteClips and CopyPaste, but unlike JumpCut which is freeware. It costs USD 12 and you can get a crippled demo from the developer’s web site .

The developer plans to use any money raised from the app to help finance a trip to Japan to pursue his career as a professional wrestler.clipboard, extender, productivity, menubar, helpful apps

Andreas Amann has updated his excellent conversion utility for Eudora, Mail.app and Thunderbird again.

The new version (4.6.1) features the following improvements and bugfixes:

1. it fixes a possible infinite loop when importing Thunderbird messages with inconsistent end-of-line characters within a single header.
2. Potential crashes due to corrupt Content-Type headers in multipart messages have been fixed.
3. It no longer produces a malformed rules file for Mail.app when importing Eudora filters based on «Label».
4. When importing mailboxes from Windows, it now removes folder/mailbox suffixes in all caps.

Andreas has also produced a chart that shows EMC’s conversion abilities:

It can convert from Eudora to Mail.app, from Eudora to Thunderbird and from Thunderbird to Mail.app. Very handy indeed.

Andreas makes this software available for free but does not refuse donations from satisfied users. You can get Eudora Mailbox Cleaner — and his excellent Mail Scripts — from his web site .eudora, thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, converting, mailboxes, filters, email addresses, switching

Bryan Veloso takes Hawk Wings’ little posts on replacing icons in Mail.app’s interface and on the “Hasta La Vista” Windows replacement set to a whole new level.

He has posted an excellent tutorial with screenshots on replacing the icons in the Mailbox Drawer.

He uses Pixadex and icons from the Minium icon set , but you could use any icons that took your fancy.interface, mail.app, apple mail, icons, hacks, mods