If you have Photoshop and a bit of patience, it is easy to roll your own stamp icon for Mail.app.

Thanks to John Godfrey, you can download an icon template in PSD format from his web site.

The zip file contains instructions on how to insert your desired image into the template. It helps if you rotate it about 11.2 degrees counter-clockwise and resize it to a width of about 85-90 pixels.

When the image is ready, you can use a freeware utility like img2icns to convert it into an icon file.

Img2icns has just been updated. The new version (0.3) is a universal binary, handles .tiff files better and is smarter about saving the finished product.

Obviously, you can have an enormous amount of fun playing around with this:

Here, after ten minutes work, are a Cult of Mac icon, a productivity-enhancing Merlin Mann talisman, a Daring Fireball logo and a Leopard stamp, just itching for 10.5 to be released.

The template itself has a small graphical bug in it. The space between the lines in the postmark is not fully transparent. It’s not fatal, but I can’t fix it without wrecking the rest of the image (Photoshop genius that I am). Perhaps you can.

Once your .icns file is ready, you can follow the instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post to replace Mail.app’s default icon.

So get to it. Post me your coolest work and win the coveted “Hawk Wings Icon of the Week” award.mail.app, apple mail, icon, dock, tips, stamp icons, make your own

A few days ago, the Hawk Wings list of 254 different stamp icons for Mail.app was dugg.

Before the digg, Mint tells me that 58% of visitors to Hawk Wings use Safari and 27% Firefox.

After the digg—and a fair bit of traffic—those figures are 47% and 37%.

I don’t know what it means, but it’s interesting. Perhaps Firefox users are more social.hawkwings, safari, firefox, digg, what does it all mean?

Maciej Ceglowski decided to use Mail.app to archive the early letters of Alexander Pushkin , in part inspired by the Samuel Pepys Blog and in part because email clients offer built-in search and sort features.

It went quite well, but didn’t completely satisfy:

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

He plans to set up an IMAP server to store this kind of information as emails. And he is looking for good sources of material.mail.app, apple mail, pushkin, literature, archiving, searching, sorting

TypeIt4Me is a snippet and text expansion utility like TextExpander (once Textpander).

These utilities speed up the typing in Mail.app and elsewhere to an unbelievable degree, and save me more time than anything else except, perhaps, Quicksilver.

Version 3.0 which was released yesterday is a major update. It is now a universal binary and its user interface has been completely rewritten in Cocoa.

Major new features include support for Rich Text Format in snippets and the clever ability to make individual snippets active only in particular apps.

The interface is clear and can be grasped as once by anyone who has used TextExpander. The preferences pane shows some of the app’s other features:

It can now import clippings files from TextExpander and Typinator and offers nested snippets, the ability to wrap the contents of the clipboard within a snippet improved support for images in snippets and more.

Devoted productivity nuts will be glad to know that they are no longer restricted to 2,700 abbreviations.

I noticed something else excellent straight away; TypeIt4Me does not suffer the occasional one or two second delay that afflicts TextExpander. Nice.

TypeIt4Me is shareware (USD 27) and a 30 day unlimited demo is available from the developer’s web site .snippets, text, productivity, typing, give your fingers a break, textexpander, typeit4me, text expansion

Mark Stosberg has posted a list of five power tips for serious Thunderbird users.

When Mark switched from mutt, he was “skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.”

But Thunderbird surprised him. Not only does it rival mutt, it offers “a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels.”

He outlines how he makes the most of Thunderbird’s filtering and labels to increase his productivity and offers four keyboard-enhancing extensions for Thunderbird.

He rounds his list out with “Master keyboard shortcuts” and a tip on using Unison to sync his Thunderbird folder between multiple Macs.thunderbird, productivity, tips, extensions, keyboard shortcuts, labels, filtering, synching, mutt

Georg Klein has updated his Mail2iCal AppleScript which creates an iCal event from a selected Mail.app message.

The new version (1.5) now also creates to-dos, incorporating the function of his Mail2iCalToDo script.

It also now comes with an installer and offers you the option at installation of nominating a default calendar for the events and to-dos.

When activated from the script menu, a new dialog lets you choose to make an event or a to-do from the message:

Behind the scenes, several bugs have been fixed and the script now saves its preferences in a standard plist file.

You can get Mail2iCal from Georg’s site , from MacUpdate or from VersionTracker .ical, events, to-dos, todos, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, mail2ical, productivity

When Tony Arnold uncovered the hidden preference pane for Quicksilver’s new Cube interface, he just assumed that everyone would know how to configure the various settings.

I was only able to produce interfaces that made my eyes smart. They looked terrible but kept me awake in the wee hours.

Fortunately for the graphically-challenged, Quicksilver users are sharing their tricked-out cubes and the settings for them in a thread on the Quicksilver forum

Productivity with style.quicksilver, hacks, tips, cube interface, productivity