We’re off to the beach house for a few weeks. That means rock-pooling, reading, rolling around with the kids in the surf, mountains of seafood, deciding whether Chardonnay really is the new Sauvignon Blanc and afternoon siestas.

There’s lots to read (Hawk Wings Greatest Hits 2006, Getting started with Hawk Wings and more) and a fat list of plugins and addons, full of things to play around with, while I’m gone.

Last year, I said I would take a break. But I broke down after two days and kept posting over the wonky dial-up connection at the beach.

This year I am determined to be stronger. Well, that is to say, someone I know very well is determined that I will be stronger.

Thanks for a great year. Thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for donating.

Have a most excellent Christmas and the finest of new years.

I’ll be back on 8 January. I’m looking forward to it.

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Excellent!

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It’s that time of year again.

Here are two lists of greatest hits for the year: the five stories that readers liked the most (that is, the five stories with the highest number of page impressions) and the five stories that I liked the most or felt made the greatest contribution to the themes of the blog:

Readers’ favourites:

1. Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done
2. 292 different Apple Mail icons
3. Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam
4. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have
5. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail

My favourites

1. “Talking Mail.app” series wrap up - Merlin Mann, John Gruber, Leander Kahney, Drunken Batman and many more on what’s good about Mail and what sucks.
2. Hacking Quicksilver’s Cube interface for bigger icons - Get readable icons for Quicksilver’s new(ish) Cube interface.
3. Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app - Simple steps to a speed and space increase.
4. Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now - Getting Tiger Mail’s new features now.
5. Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon - A template for creating a Mail stamp icon of your very own.

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Scott Davis has made an important discovery about SMTP ports. As a result, he no longer has to choose between email and coffee.

Setting his outgoing SMTP server in Mail.app to use port 587 means that he can now knock back his lattes at Starbucks and send emails at the same time.

The breakthrough came after years of frustration. He didn’t want to sacrifice the beauty of Apple Mail for a web-based service that would have provided him with a work-around for Starbuck’s blocked port 25:

I used Yahoo mail as my primary client for years. But once I got started using Mail.app, the thought of going back is singularly unappealing. (Yeah, GMail as well…) Plus, I’ve started to depend more and more on Spotlight to retrace my steps. (”I said what? When? To who? What was I thinking?”) Doing a non-insignificant portion of my emailing out of band was really beginning to cramp my style.

Gmail may not be the answer, but Google was his friend:

… what pushed me over the edge was the fact that port 25 was progressively getting blocked in more and more places. Starbucks, hotels, and finally my Mom’s Wifi connection at home. Allow me to repeat that in case you missed it: I COULDN’T EMAIL FROM MY MOM’S HOUSE. Something had to change.

Out of desperation, I Googled “apple starbucks send email”. At the end of one message thread, someone cryptically suggested changing port 25 to 587. No explanation, and no report back of whether it succeeded or not. I began Googling more: “starbucks port 587″, “secure smtp port 587″, etc. Apparently, all of the cool kids use port 25 for server-to-server communication and use port 587 for message submission.

Gmail offers port 465 with SSL for its smtp.gmail.com server, although it rewrites the from address on any email sent that way to identify you by your Gmail address, unless you set another email address as your default in Gmail’s settings (see more on this at Lifehacker). Not always a good look.

Fastmail offers port 26 and 465 with SSL as work-arounds.

.Mac likes port 587.

Your ISP might offer a way to extend your stay in Starbucks too.

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Microsoft is recommending that that employers increase the size of Exchange mailboxes, as it moves to head off the increasing trend among workers to auto-forward their email to more expansive Gmail accounts.

Other new features in Exchange 2007 also take aim at Gmail’s search and mobile-access features.

Dan Warne at APC Magazine reports that,

IT departments have traditionally applied such restrictive limits to Exchange Server mailboxes -as low as 25MB per staff member - that users have become frustrated with repeated “your mailbox is full” errors.

Meanwhile, only senior execs have been granted access to work email from home, or via a Blackberry.

As a result, more and more users are auto-forwarding all their email to Gmail, where they have a 2.7GB mailbox capacity and can access it wherever they are - even via a mobile phone.

Microsoft hopes that larger mailboxes will stem the flood.

It will also offer a search feature 35 times faster than Exchange 2003 and plans to release a mobile-access app for Exchange, code-named “Crossbow”, which will offer remote searching of, and quick access to, Exchange mail.

Not everyone is a lucky as me. The IT Department where I work would rather carve their own hearts out with an Apple Remote than run Exchange. It also provides bottomless mailboxes.

If you are really interested in what the new Exchange 2007 will be like, or if your workplace forces you to use it, you can see some demos of the new features on Microsoft’s web site.

You can also look forward to Microsoft’s promise that,

Exchange Server 2007 was designed from the ground up to enable your IT department to deliver bold new communication capabilities - voice-controlled inboxes, Outlook-based voice mail - without sacrificing productivity or compromising budgets.

[Via APC Magazine ]

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Web designer and self-confessed standards fanatic Jeff Croft is not dreaming of a white Christmas. He is dreaming of the best imaginable Mail.app that might come his way in Leopard.

Of course, he is also dreaming of a better Safari, a faster Spotlight and other things that have no place on this blog.

But when he gets around to Mail, iCal and Address Book, he pulls out all the stops:

Better integration of the personal productivity and communication apps. It is, frankly, appalling that iCal, Mail.app, Address Book and iChat know very little about each other in the current Mac OS X environment. I want Google-like recognition of phrases and other natural-language idioms in e-mail. If Matt e-mails me and says, “we need to have the weather page working by noon tomorrow,” Mail.app should prompt me to create a to-do item in iCal with a due date of 12:00pm tomorrow, a summary of “Have weather page working”), with Matt included as an attendee and a link to his Address Book card. If I get an e-mail from Dan that says, “Let’s chat about this tomorrow around 3pm,” I want a pop-up on my screen tomorrow at three that says, “Dan is currently online. Would like to start a video chat?”

I’ve been getting a taste for this greater integration by playing around on Zimbra at work. It cleverly displays a pop-up with your existing appointments when you mouse over text that it has parsed a date. Nice.

Much improved Mail.app. I love the overall UI of Mail.app and I haven’t found anything I like better. But, still, there are several improvements that can be made, especially in terms of performance. Mail.app sucks with large IMAP folders, and I’ve got several of them. Could I break them into smaller folders? Sure. Should I have to? Hell no. Smart Mailboxes, a true gem of Mail.app, are a little underpowered. Compared to iTunes, there just aren’t enough filtering attributes. Many people want a widescreen version of Mail.app, so it seems like a worthy addition, even though I’m not sure it’s something I could get used to personally. And yeah, we could stand to loose the gel-cap icons (although I don’t find them nearly as offensive as some folks do).

(In a spirit of seasonal goodwill towards the Mail Team, I tried to run Mail.app with the lozenge buttons again a week ago. But I… just… couldn’t… bear… it. If you feel the same, help is at hand.)

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