Apple Mail users with webmail-based email accounts have a number of options for getting their emails into Mail.app. I had occasion to look at them again today, although mistakenly.

Frequent changes in log in procedures due to the current rapid interface development in some services breaks them from time to time.

As far as I can tell, this is the current state of play.

The easiest to use, Mail Forward, is working fine. It has just been updated (3.2.2) to accommodate Windows Live Mail beta service changes and tell you more exactly why it can’t work with Yahoo! Mail Beta accounts. It works as a a “webmail translator” that forwards your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo webmail transparently into Mail.app. (I know that there are more directly ways to get your Gmail and AOL email, but this app offers to do it too).

It retrieved emails from my Yahoo! (set not to use the beta) and Hotmail test accounts today without any problems. It works, it’s easy to set up but it’s shareware (19.95 USD)

MacFreePOPs is a GUI front-end for the open source FreePOPs project. It free, works with a wider variety of services and is harder to set up.

Even with the latest version (1.6) and the latest modules for Yahoo! and Hotmail, I couldn’t get it to work for me today. A quick glance at the support forum , reveals that lots of Hotmail and Yahoo! users are having problems at the moment. The developer is working on fixes for both.

HTTPMail is a specific plugin for older Hotmail and MSN accounts. Newer accounts need to be upgraded to Hotmail Plus in order for the plugin to work. I can’t test this. It’s freeware and comes in Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and Universal Binary flavours.

Have I missed any?mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, msn, plugins, tips

Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention , Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).

She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:

When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.

This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.

By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.

[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]mail.app, apple mail, junk, tags, email, offline, to-do list, searching

Postini, the spam-catching and security-monitoring company, has released its report on the health of email for September 2006.

The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.

It also reports that,

at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.

Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.

Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.

Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.

I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.

Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.email, spam, phishing, viruses, internet, the end is nigh

According to a report on MacNN, Yahoo! has withdrawn POP3 access for external mail clients like Mail.app. Yahoo! webmail users will now only be able to use the service’s webmail interface.

The news item points to a Yahoo! Mail support statement that reads:

As a web-based email service, Yahoo! Mail does not currently offer access to POP or SMTP servers. This means that you will not be able to use an external email client such as Netscape Mail, Eudora, or Outlook to access your Yahoo! Mail account.

This seems to be a odds with other information (still?) on the Yahoo! Mail support site about POP3 access for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts, and with my recollection that POP access has always been denied to users with free accounts.

Can anyone shed any more light on this?

UPDATE: Hmmm…. This may be a false alarm. Light shed in the comments suggests that no major change to existing restrictions has occurred. [Thanks, Ivan et al.]mail.app, apple mail, yahoo, webmail, POP, external access

Troels Bay has just released a menubar notification utility for Google’s RSS Reader which matches the other Google app menubar notification apps for Gmail and Google Calendar.

The drop-down menu offers the ability to jump into the Reader, to preview the subject lines of articles in your Google Reader feed, or to check for updates manually.

Clicking on a previewed subject line takes you to the original web page rather into Google Reader. A nice touch.

A Preference pane lets you set the period for automatic updates and to restrict notification to articles with a particular label.

You can also choose the level of security you are comfortable with:

Google Reader Notifier is a universal binary, freeware and available from Troel’s web site .google reader, RSS, menubar, notification, not apple mail, productivity

Michael Okeh has created four alternative icons for Address Book for people who are tired of the plain brown notebook or who just like to tweak the look of their Desktop.

You can get them from deviantART .

They come in four assorted colours:

They are PNG files, so you will need to use a conversion utility like img2icns to convert them into the ICNS format used for application icons.

After that, you can just follow the usual instructions for replacing Mail.app’s icon.address book, icons, tweaking, hacks

Stephen Love emails to let me know that the R|Mail link for subscribing to Hawk Wings by email is broken.

It must have been that way since I moved the blog to TextDrive earlier in the year. Oops. Apologies.

At least it’s fixed now, with the provider of the RSS-to-email service switched to Feedburner. You can subscribe in the sidebar or here.

I prefer to get the feeds of my half-a-dozen favourite blogs this way. It helps to make my inbox a better “bucket” (as the productivity gurus say) for collecting the information I need to process. It might work for you too. mail.app, apple mail, rss to email, feedburner, productivity, feeds, RSS