Aaron Hanly, the developer behind the widescreen Letterbox plugin for Mail.app, offers a plugin template for others who might be interested in writing a plugin for Mail.

The XCode template is “pretty bare-bones”, he writes, but will spare you some of the hack work and provide a helping hand to plugin novices.

He also provides a longer list of suggestions to get you started.

James Eagan, Missing Attachments plugin creator, has also written a tutorial on how to make a Mail.app plugin.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, howto, template, tips, developing, coding

Merlin Mann has posted a series of iCal tips that will breath new life into your use of Groups and Notes.

He uses Groups to organise his calendars into contexts or “areas of responsiblity”.

The Notes field gets a good working over too. “I use the crap out of iCal’s various extra fields”, he says. You could too.

Merlin also offers some miscellaneous tips, including the use of “dashes”, marking small tasks so that they can be found with a quick search. Clever.ical, tips, groups, notes, dashes, productivity, Merlin Mann

The Exchange/Outlook Product Manager for the UK, Allister Frost, has posted the “Best Outlook tip in the world” on his blog.

It’s not what you are thinking. He doesn’t recommend switching to Ubuntu.

Instead, he offers a long post in praise of the delete key, which works as well in Apple Mail as it does in Outlook.

His post shows you how to power through your Inbox, featuring,

1. The Three Ds – Do, Defer, Delete, two
2. Two questions – Is this email important to my objectives? Is it actionable?
3. One result – more time for the things that matter.

He spices the whole mix with an anecdote that will strike fear into the hearts of email hoarders:

Back in the early 1990′s my boss would return to the office after a holiday and ceremoniously empty his (at this time paper-filled) in-tray into the bin. He was so right when he said “If it’s important, they’ll let me know.”

By deleting extraneous information and concentrating only on what is important to you and your personal objectives you can regain control over the email monster and achieve a happier and more fulfilling work-life balance.

You will be amazed, he says, how much of your email you can delete when you put your mind to it.email, productivity, the delete key, inbox, saving time, do, delete, defer

As everyone knows, few things in life are more annoying than people who email you those daily funnies that come their way. (See further, “How the delete key is your friend”).

Having said that, if you ever find yourself doing things at the command-line, you may enjoy what follows the jump. Terminal-heads only, this way please…

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Although my own experience of the 10.4.7 update and Mail.app has been completely trouble-free, not everyone has been so lucky. MacUser carries a good summary of some general problems.

MacInTouch has a collection of readers’ reports about problems following the recent update. Almost all of them mention Mail. The posters either have problems or are just disillusioned like this one:

It’s been how many years now, that Mail has been out? How many updates to the OS, and still, *still* Apple has not fixed the problem that Mail has wrt long URIs: It breaks them in such a way that only Mail seems to be able to handle. Users of other Mail software are unable to click on the resulting links.

With the 10.4.7 update, they’ve certainly addressed some bugs in Mail, but this is STILL not one of them. I think the argument can be made that it’s more serious than some of the ones they have fixed.

I’ve reported this bug several times to Apple, as have my colleagues, but maybe we need a more public rant.

I don’t think that Apple will “fix” this problem. The “delsp=yes” flag that triggers this behaviour (read more about it in an earlier Hawk Wings post) is well-documented in the RFC standard.

Apple (I imagine) doesn’t think this is a bug in Mail.app. It’s the rest of the world that lags behind, and we Mail users must wait for other email clients to catch up.

We just have to take the taunts of our non-Mail-using buddies on the nose, or use one workaround or another in the meantime.mail.app, apple mail, 10.4.7, problems, bugs, frustrations, broken URLs, delsp=yes, RFC

Josue Salazar has a problem with Gmail’s spam filter.

After switching from Mail.app to the web-interface to read his Gmail, something odd began to happen:

I started to notice 90% of the email in my Gmail inbox was spam. I marked it as such, wondered what was going on, but in the end I just moved on.

Today, I realized there was something wrong…. I decided to take a quick look at the Spam folder. As expected, all the emails I’d marked as spam on my inbox were there, but to my surprise so were tons of emails from my contacts, and two job offers from days ago. What the hell?

Josue emailed asking if I would mention this onslaught of false positives “to see if someone else is having the same issues I am, or if it’s just me seeing things.” I don’t know the answer, not using Gmail as much as I possibly should.

Dr Drang has a suggestion about how Gmail’s spam filtering could be improved. He is fairly happy; Gmail catches 85% of his spam, but he worries about the other 15%, most of it not in English. It could be solved, he suggests, by

the ability to filter based on the character set used in the message. I cannot read anything written Asian or Cyrillic characters and no one I know would send me such a message, so it must be spam. Back in my Linux days, I used the procmail filter given in the Bogofilter FAQ to eliminate Asian spam before my spam filter even saw it…. The Google folks are generally considered the smartest working on the web today; they should be able to whip up a character set filter in no time.

gmail, Google, spam, filtering, foreign languages, false positives

Sometimes Mail can get so tweaked, hacked, extended or just plain busted that reinstalling the whole thing from scratch is the only solution.

It happened to me once about a year ago. Last week Hawk Wings reader Fred emailed me asking how to do it.

First, you need to remove Mail from your system. Quit Mail. In Finder, drag your ~/Library/Mail folder to the Desktop. This gives you a backup in the event of something going horribly wrong and an archive of your messages, especially important if you use POP for your accounts.

If you use IMAP, your emails are all safely stored on the server and Mail will simply download them again, rebuilding its local cache, when you open the restored app for the first time.

Then do the same with your Mail preferences file, com.apple.mail.plist which you can find in the ~/Library/Preferences folder. This contains all your account information, which you should have written down somewhere as you will need to re-enter it.

For a complete uninstall, you will want to remove the contents of the ~/Library/Mail Downloads folder as well.

If you are using Tiger (10.4.x), reinstalling is simple. You can now reinstall individual apps from the installation disks, without the need for a third-party package extractor like Pacifist . Insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ .

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

If you are still using Panther (10.3.x), you will need to use Pacifist. It’s shareware (USD 20) and is fully documented online in English and French.

If you use IMAP, all you need to do now is open up your brand-new copy of Mail, enter your account details and watch as your messages are retrieved again from the server.

If you use POP, you may also want to restore your messages using the method outlined in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

Lastly, you need to install the 10.4.7 Combo update (PPC or Intel ), even if you have installed it before. This will update Mail.app to the current version.

Obviously you will need to reinstall all the plugins that you use. You may know what they are or you can find them again through the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. mail.app, apple mail, reinstall, installation disks, custom install, tips, when all else fails