Earl Moore at Meandering Passage posts a description and flow chart of how he gets things done using Mail.app, iCal, kGTD and DEVONthink Pro .

The schema highlights the role of Mail.app as the collection bucket for 75-85% of the things he needs to do.

From Mail.app the sorting starts:

This is where my electronic communications are initially collected. If I receive something and I can do immediately, I do it from within Mail and then export the completed email task into my DEVONthink Pro archive (@File).

If it’s a project or has a future due-date I send the item to Kinkless GTD (kGTD) where a task is created with all the email body as part of the task description. From that point I handle it in kGTD. If something is only a Reference Item or a Maybe Someday Item I send it to DEVONthink Pro to file.

Mail Act-on and Quicksilver are used to speed up the sorting / filing / sifting.

I always enjoy reading about the structures other people use to get things done. It keeps me open and flexible in my own system and helps me to grasp more clearly what’s right for me in GTD and what’s not.

Test your own system .

[Thanks, Scott]GTD, getting things done, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, ical, quicksilver, kGTD, very pretty flowcharts

Two months ago, Hawk Wings posted about an iCal hack for using Growl to display its alerts. It was clever, complicated and sacrificed the ability to email alerts.

Thomas Aylott has improved on the hack , writing a smarter script that enables Growl notifications by default, but which preserves the ability to email alerts as normal.

It is still complicated and involves digging around in the iCal package, replacing scripts. If you like that kind of thing and you like Growl, you will want to try it out for yourself.ical, growl, notifications, alerts, hacks, applescript, productivity

Pukka is a posting client for del.icio.us that can be activated quickly by a bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.

It automatically loads the URL and title of the active web page into its interface. All you have to do is tag it, type a description if you want and post it. Highlighted text on the page is added to the description field. Very quick. Very smart.

And it has just got smarter. Version 1.3 released over the weekend adds support for private bookmarking through a new option in the app’s preferences pane:

Holding down the option key when posting now prevents the app from resetting.

The new version also adds full AppleScript support.

See it in action in a screencast. Pukka is shareware (USD 5) and available from codesorcery’s web site .delicious, URL, bookmarks, posting, bookmarklet, applescript, private posting, web 2.0, social

Snail Mail is a stand-alone app that addresses and prints very nice envelopes based on the information in your Address Book (See an earlier Hawk Wings review).

It can print single envelopes or an envelope for every member of an Address Book Group. You also select multiple cards for printing on the fly.

An updated version released today (1.5) is a universal binary.

It also supports the swapping of first and last names, easier removal of a return address and a preference to omit the delivery country if it is the same as the return address country.

Snail Mail is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, envelopes, helpful apps, productivity

With the SwiftMail Dashboard widget, you can quickly dash off an email using your Gmail, .Mac, Yahoo or AOL email account.

It offers a quick username and password setup or the option of entering detailed server information.

The widget saves the last five subject lines and the recipients in drop-down boxes to the right of the fields:

Call me a pre-Tiger throw-back if you like, but I don’t see the point of these email widgets.

It’s no faster than switching to Mail.app or using Quicksilver to dash off the note.

Perhaps it is faster than switching to Entourage or Thunderbird or the web-based interface of those services.

You can get the freeware widget from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Once briefly QuickMail before becoming SwiftMail (briefly), the widget is now called “DashMail” (for the moment).

[Via TUAW ]widget, dashboard, email, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, productivity

The latest version of Thunderbird is more stable and brings the email client up to date with the latest Mozilla security fixes.

The update also brings some welcome improvements for Mac users.

Newsgroups are no longer “over-abbreviated” and HTML text cut from Firefox 1.5.0.5 now pastes into an email message properly.

You can read a fuller list of improvements and bugfixes on The Rumbling Edge, Mozilla’s Development blog.

Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 is available from the Mozilla web site .

[Thanks, Bronson]thunderbird, email, security, HTML, firefox

Some people (notably John Gruber ) find one behaviour in Mail.app “both wrong and endlessly frustrating”.

The problem is this: If you use Shift-Arrow keys to select multiple messages in the Mail’s Message Viewer, hitting Shift-Up to deselect a message highlighted by mistake doesn’t deselect it. It selects the message immediately above the top selected email instead.

Try it. I had never even attempted this before, so it was news to me.

The fault is caused (I learn from John’s post) by the default list controls in Data Browser (Carbon apps like Finder and iTunes) and in NSTableView (Cocoa apps).

Jim Speth has written a plugin for Mail.app that makes the Shift-Arrow key combination behave as many believe it should.

If ⌘-Clicking the offending item selected by mistake doesn’t satisfy, this may be solution for you.

LiveJournal blogger Nevyn has taken the fix a step further by turning the plugin into an Input Manager that will correct the behaviour in all Cocoa apps. One small hitch; it crashes the Adium 1.0 beta.

[Via Daring Fireball ]mail.app, apple mail. Message selection, keyboard shortcuts, bug