Mike Abdullah has updated his excellent Event Maker utility which allows for the quick creation of to-dos or events from an email in Mail.app or from scratch.

Coupled to a Quicksilver trigger (or similar), it is available system-wide, not only in Mail, as a slick way to get meetings and reminders into iCal.

The most recent version (0.4.3) fixes bugs in the Undo and Redo menus and tweaks the display of its alarms option.

Since, I last posted about it, the app has also added AppleScript support for alarms and keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing alarms.

Extra nifty, something that I had not noticed before, it allows you to set multiple alarms for the one event, in this case an email 45 minutes before, a message alert fifteen minutes before and then to launch a script that starts the event:

I’m not going to be able to forget that one easily.

Of course, most of the time I am using the clever new features in the public beta of MailTags to do this kind of scheduling work, but Event Maker is a very handy addition to my productivity tool-kit for the rare times that I am not in Mail but still need to schedule stuff.

Event Maker is donation-ware and you can get it from MacUpdate .mail.app, apple mail, ical, productivity, to-dos, events, plugins, applescript

Today Apple’s Pro Tips web page carries a hint that was news to me. It tells you how to use Mac OS X’s built-in Disk Utility to burn multiple sessions on a single CD or DVD.

It describes how to create a burn folder, open Disk Utility, select “Image from folder” from the New option in the File menu, then highlight the new image, select burn and then — here’s the magic part — make sure that the expanded options (blue arrow button in top right) are showing in the next dialog.

Check the “Leave disc appendable” option:

Then you will be able to append further burn sessions to the same disk by following this process at each burn.

A bit of a pain in the butt perhaps, but it saves discs, saves money and saves the environment.not apple mail, CD-ROM, DVD, burning, multiple sessions, append, tip

Apple Matters has produced a walk-through on switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird using the emlx to mbox converter from CosmicSoft.

It covers all the steps from finding your Mail.app messages, converting, moving and importing them again and features some screenshots to help you on your way.

Perhaps the emlx to mbox converter has got smarter or perhaps the author was lucky, but he doesn’t mention any of the problems encountered by another user trying to do the same thing, which were posted on macOSXHints some time ago.

Needless to say, moving back the other way again from Thunderbird to Mail 2.0 will be easier and the outcome more pleasurable.mail.ap, apple mail, thunderbird, email, switching, mbox, emlx

An article in The New York Times this weekend draws attention to the importance and dangers of how you sign off your emails.

One entrepreneur tells the story of a deal gone bad and of deteriorating email signatures:

As negotiations started to break down, the sign-offs started to get decidedly shorter and cooler,” Mr. Troutwine recalled. “In the beginning it was like, ‘I look forward to speaking with you soon’ and ‘Warmest regards,’ and by the end it was just ‘Best.’

The article suggests that the more fluid medium of email makes senders and recipients equally unsure how to read the signs. At sign-off that becomes crucial:

Those final few words above your name are where relationships and hierarchies are established, and where what is written in the body of the message can be clarified or undermined.

One danger is that people will always interpret what you write differently. The entrepreneur above thought “Best” a brush-off. On the other hand:

I use ‘Best’ for all of my professional e-mails,” said Kelly Brady, a perky publicist in New York. “It’s friendly, quick and to the point.”

(Aren’t stereotypes great?)

It’s possible to spend a lot of time thinking about this:

Because people read so much into a sign-off, said Richard Kirshenbaum, chief creative officer of the advertising firm Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, he has thought deeply about his preferred closing to professional correspondence, “Warmly, RK.” He did not want something too emotional, like “Love,” or too formal, like “Sincerely.” “ ‘Warmly’ fell comfortably in between,” he said. “I want to convey a sense of warmth and passion, but also be appropriate.”

Or, like me, to spend too little. Knowing how fast I am going myself to get through my inbox, I tend not to read too much into a brief sign-off from someone else. No doubt, I am missing all the important signs.

Like all things email-etiquette related, balance seems the best target.

The one with the carefully-crafted and appropriate words can close the deal / get the job done / comfort the sobbing student / palm off the essay marking to some gullible sucker / [insert your own professionally-appropriate career goal here]. But the one who spends too much time thinking about it or over-interpreting email sign-offs gets nothing done.

Whatever you decide, you can’t dodge the issue by chosing nothing:

Many e-mail users don’t bother with a sign-off, and Letitia Baldridge, the manners expert, finds that annoying. “It’s so abrupt,” she said, “and it’s very unfriendly. We need grace in our lives, and I’m not talking about heavenly grace. I’m talking about human grace. We should try and be warm and friendly.”

The punchline belongs to Ms Mitchell who believes, among other things, that “good corporate governance is simply good manners”:

“While on the one hand e-mail encourages people to write, on the other hand it discourages people to write thoughtfully.”

[Much more on email etiquette in previous Hawk Wings posts.]etiquette, email in general, manners, not apple mail

The utility that I use to wrangle many of the icons on the Alternative Mail Stamp Icons List has just been updated.

img2icns is a freeware, open-source application that converts image files (supporting every format that I have ever thrown at it) into mac-friendly icons.

Its redesigned interface offers you a choice of output formats – icns file or a folder with an attached icon – and an export path.

Conversion is as easy as dropping the image(s) onto the interface’s bulls-eye:

It’s a very handy tool to have in the cupboard. Better yet, it doesn’t cost anything.

The app is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .images, icons, convert, freeware, mail.app, stamp icon

Evan Gross has released a “lite” version of his excellent Spell Catcher X utility.

Spell Catcher X is a multi-facetted app that offers interactive spelling correction, text snippet management, a substantial array of text manipulations (smarten the quotes in a selection or strip white space, for example) and more.

See Bob LeVitus’ review of Spell Catcher X on MacObserver (“Who Kneads Spill Chicken?” ) more more.

The most-used SCX feature on my MacBook Pro is the interactive spell-checking, which not only detects errors as you make them, but offers suggestions on what you meant to type:

Wonderful stuff. This alone pays for the cost of the app within a month.

The Lite version shaves USD 10 off the price of the full version. For that reduced price you have to make do without the interactive auto-completion of words you are typing, the Ghostwriter feature which saves text as you type for recovery in case of disaster and the text manipulation features.

Also, it only supports US English and the additional extra-cost language modules. The other six “default” languages won’t work.

Evan has produced a detailed list of differences .

The full version of Spell Catcher X costs USD 39.95; the Lite version USD 29.95. Both of them and a demo are available from Evan’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, text, spell checking, productivity, text snippets, working faster smarter better

Reports on eWeek.com and on SearchSecurity.com claim that a highly sophisticated Russian bot-net is pumping out the current surge in image spam.

According to a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, the bot-netters grew their 70,000 strong zombie network with the SpamThru trojan, an innovative piece of malware which not only packs its own pirated version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus to eradicate any competing malware from infected computers, but also uses a list of proxy servers to evade blacklisting by anti-spam agencies.

The researcher also claims to have uncovered evidence that the spammers harvested lists of email addresses from financial institutions:

It also appears the spammer made an effort to obtain more targeted lists of email addresses by hacking into smaller investment news Web sites and other e-businesses and downloading their user databases,” he said. “This is likely due to the fact that pump-and-dump stock spam seems to be a primary motive of the botnet.

Mail.app users can get some level of protection by creating a rule to filter some of these images spams out.

David Reitter takes a slightly different approach with a different rule.

Fastmail users (and others with tweakable server-side spam protection) may get some extra relief from this tip on EmailDiscussions.com which creates a more sophisticated rule.

[Via Daring Fireball ]mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, email, bot-net, trojan