Mail.app’s version number changes from Version 2.1 (752/752.2) to Version 2.1.1 (752.3) after an update to 10.4.8 (Intel , PPC ) on an Intel Mac, but it’s not immediately clear what new features or improvements (if any) the update brings.

Apple continues its campaign to enforce the lozenge icons introduced with Tiger, overwriting any modifications with the default Tiger icons. Luckily, Mail Stamps soon removes them again.

Other plugins appear to be unaffected by the update.

Presumably, Mail users will benefit from added security to WebKit, but I can’t discover any changes in Mail.app itself. Can you?

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Tom Stafford, author of Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools for Using your Brain and psychologist, thinks that he might be addicted to email.

He tells a disturbing story (extra disturbing because I see myself in it):

I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am supposed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.

He thinks that the answer is to be found in “operant conditioning”, one of the cardinal principles of behaviourist psychology:

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century.

One solution is to break the connection between action and reward. Like Glen Stansberry and Merlin Mann he recommends reducing the frequency of mail checks. Hard-core fans of the cold turkey school will check mail only twice a day. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon, but it might work for you. Or close Mail.app altogether for six or eight hours. Urrggh.

Other possibilities, he suggests, are weakening the stimulus-action association (hide the Check Mail button), shifting the cost-benefit ratio (electric shocks administered by a mail check?) and rewarding alternative behaviour.

Whatever you might think about Behaviourism, it’s interesting reading, as is the link he provides to an article published eighteen months ago in the New York Times on designing computer interfaces that aid rather than diminish attention.

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Jon Crosby has released a public beta of his new GTD application Actiontastic which takes a powerfully simple approach to implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach to productivity.

I’ve only played with it for thirty minutes, but it looks very likely to earn a place in my list of Ten GTD apps for Mac Users. I like it.

The interface is intentionally sparse and focussed (Jon says that the app is designed to be “a lean mean action contextifying machine”):

New projects and actions can be added in the Inbox, the Project view lists actions and their contexts for each project and the Context view lists actions by context, including an option to view just the next action in each context.

It’s beta software. As the release notes warn “because this is a pre-release version of the upcoming 1.0 release, please note that it may behave in strange ways on your Mac.”

It includes hints of features still to come like web syncing.

Jon is actively seeking feedback and user requests.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 12 October, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.

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Maza Digital has re-released its Email Backup app as a shareware app called Email Backup Pro.

It offers a simple schedule for the complete backup of messages and settings in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora and MS Entourage X and 2004. The shareware version adds a restore option and comes with an optional add-on to manage backups on external harddrives.

The interface clearly presents options for the location and timing of the backups and the number of backup to save:

If you want to save your backups to an external drive that is not always connected, an additional freeware app Email Backup On Mount is provided.

It watches for the mounting on the remote drive and prompts you to do a backup when it is connected. It also offers menubar access to Email Backup Pro’s main features.

The backups are compressed as zip files with the date of the backup and the extension .ebp, which helps with subsequent identification and saves space.

Restoring the backup is as easy as selecting “Restore” from the app’s Tools menu.

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .

Documentation is not included in the download, but is available separately.

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The current “Tip of the Week” from Apple describes how to email a URL from Safari.

It’s as easy as pressing ⇧⌘I and then sitting back while Mail.app creates a new message containing the link.

That’s it.

I hesitated about posting this, but sometimes tips aren’t as well known as you might think, like using ⌘] and ⌘[ to cycle through the available HTML, Rich Text and plain text views of an email, or using Gmail-like “Conversation” views in Apple Mail.

If you use some other browser, you will have to make your own arrangements. OminWeb users can use a bookmarklet to send a link, Firefox users can customise their toolbar by adding a “Send Link” button and Camino users can uses ⇧⌘L.

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Apple is offering a teasing preview of its new-look .Mac webmail interface.

The obvious goal is to make it feel as much like using Mail.app as possible. Hence the general look complete with the much-loved Tiger lozenges, auto-completing email addresses from Address Book and message flagging.

It also adds bits and pieces from elsewhere: Ajax-like drag and drop à la Yahoo!’s new interface and inline display of the start of the message from GMail, but it also has a trick of its very own.

As a “.Mac webmail exclusive”, a Quick Reply feature lets you “dash off a response without leaving your Inbox”.

Will it be enough to silence .Mac’s many, many, many, many critics or even moderate their complaints? Only time will tell.

[Via TUAW ]

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