For the last eighteen months I have had a delightfully relaxed life, employed only part-time as a research fellow. So I’ve been able to do freelancing as an IT journalist and to run Hawk Wings, to “top and tail” the day with the kids, read books and get my Latin back into shape.

But a few days ago, the college where I work made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

As a result, from 1 January onwards, I’ll be working full-time. I still get to teach Greek and supervise research students (which is nice), but will also get to enjoy the Gordian knot (Wikipedia ) of administrative and higher education policy duties appropriate to a “Research and Executive Officer”.

It’s too early to say what this means for Hawk Wings. I have high hopes.

At the very least, it will give me a chance really to put my “Getting Things Done with Mail.app” system through the wringer.

And I’ll be able to do it fast. The job comes with a sweetner—the promise of a spanking brand new Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro after Leopard is released.mail.app, apple mac, productivity, personal, life change, getting things done, GTD

Konrad Lawson has written an applescript which will cleverly pick out the text of an email you have sent to yourself and use it to create a note in Yojimbo.

You attach it to a rule that matches text in the subject line (like, say, “Note:”). Then anywhere that you have access to email — the coffee shop, the library, roaming the street or wherever, you can email yourself something worth remembering. Get back to your Mac and you will find it waiting for you in Yojimbo.

It’s a useful addition to a growing number of applescripts for Yojimbo that help the app to work even smarter: Jim Correia’s script that exports a selected email into Yojimbo and Dylan Damian’s del.icio.us-NetNewsWire-Yojimbo “mash-up” scripts.yojimbo, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, notes, applescript, getting organised

Jon at WizardIsHungry is an unhappy Mail user.

He has three accounts, a Gmail account and two IMAP ones, but the mailboxes won’t behave the way he wants them to (as you can see on the right).

It’s a mess. One IMAP account is displaying its folders under the Account’s Inbox; the other “breaks them out” under a globe further down the Mailbox Viewer.

As if that’s not bad enough, Mail.app is also eating his draft and sent messages instead of storing them in one of his two (!) Sent folders.

Abstruse error messages in the Console only add insult to injury.

Enough’s enough. It’s good-bye to Mail.app as far as Jon is concerned:

So I guess I’ll be migrating to Thunderbird once I get a free couple days to export all my mail and regenerate my IMAP mailbox. If anyone has any hints about migration or using Thunderbird, I’d like to hear them.

Luckily for him, Derik DeLong from MacUser posted all the answers in a comment to Jon’s post.

Some of his problems can be fixed by setting the right IMAP path prefix for his email provider (More on this in a post and comments on Joseph Scott’s blog).

The rest can be fixed by using the Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For… menu option to set the folders that Mail uses for its Draft, Sent, Trash and Junk mailboxes (See Apple’s technote on this for more).mail.app, apple mail, IMAP, mailboxes, folders, special folders, IMAP path prefix, unhappy user, dog’s breakfast

Daniel Bingham has written a plugin that fixes a particular problem with Mail.app’s IMAP support.

IMAPCheck corrects Mail.app’s habit of not seeing email that has been moved into IMAP subfolders by server-side rules until you actually open the subfolder.

Instead, it forces Mail to do a full sync every time, which will increase the traffic between your IMAP server and your Mac, but will also pick up emails that you might not otherwise see.

This plugin differs from IMAP-IDLE, a plugin that creates support in Mail for IMAP’s IDLE feature.

With IMAP-IDLE installed, Mail knows about email arriving in your inbox right away. IMAPCheck lets you know about email that has arrived and been moved into another IMAP folder.

IMAPCheck comes with one limitation:

It still does not enable rules support on IMAP accounts. This bundle WILL allow Mail.app to see the new email, but it still doesn’t process rules in those folders. I looked briefly into enabling rules on these folders, but it seems to be something built directly into POP Account support.

I don’t have any server-side rules myself, but those who do will be glad of this new option.

It’s donation-ware and you can get it from Daniel’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, imap, server side, rules, mailboxes, folders, plugins

Benjamin Harley, creator of ABGMerge, the Gmail contacts-Address Book syncing app, has also scripted a powerful iCal action for Quicksilver , which is more flexible and has more options than Quicksilver’s built-in iCal plugin.

It’s complicated (power comes at a cost) but offers a speedy way to quickly enter a complete iCal item on the fly whichever app you are in. I use the current public beta of MailTags to do this when I am in Mail.app, which has the added bonus of automatically creating a URL link back to the email in question. But I’m not always in Mail (sadly).

UPDATE: You can get the latest version of the script here

Download and unzip it, then place it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder.

You will need to restart Quicksilver and may need to add the Actions folders to your Quicksilver Catalog (Click the “plus” button and use the “File and Folder Scanner”) so that Quicksilver can find it.

UPDATE: You will also need to edit the script slightly. Open it up in Script editor or the app of your choice and change the property for the default calendar from “Home” to whatever calendar you would like the to-dos and events to be created in.

To use it, type “make ical” into Quicksilver’s first window, select “Process Text…” in the Action window and then type the text to create the to-do or event in the third pane.

For example:

This creates a to-do in my Trinity Calendar, specifies a date, adds an alarm and some notes so that I will know where to send the comments on this student’s work, and opens iCal to show me that it was created correctly:

Events are just as quick and just as clever:

This creates an event for a meeting tomorrow.

I don’t need to go back to iCal to edit the event; everything I want to add I can add via the Quicksilver action.

The text for this one adds a note about how the meeting might unfold, a location, a date, a starting time, a two hour duration, specifies which calendar to add it to and adds an alarm so that my boss won’t sack me for forgetting to meet with him.

The only downside is that you need to remember the letter for each option.

Benjamin has provided some initial documentation.

The commands can be entered in any order and they are:

t-- [title of to-do]

e-- [title of event] (use t-- or e-- to determine whether the script will create a to-do or an event. The default is a to-do. So if you just type some text (without t--) it will come out as a to-do)

d-- [start date (or due date for to-dos) in m/d/y format (or whatever your system is set to). The default is today for events (in 3 days for to-dos), +n to set that many days from today], [hour in hh:mm format, 24hr clock], [end date in m/d/y format, or +n for number of days if it is an all day event, default is same as start date], [end hour in hh:mm format, +n is number of hours from start date, default is +1], [a for an all-day event].

a-- [set an alarm (default for events is -1 hour, for to-dos 10 am on due date)

n-- [to add to notes section]

l-- [location]

c-- [calendar - default is home]

p-- [priority n,l,m,h (for to-dos only)]

u-- [URL reference]

cb-- [copy contents of clipboard to notes section - will always come after the text in the n-- section]

s-- or show-- [show the event or to-do in iCal after creation so you can check and see if it is right]

Examples

‘do this d-- a-- c--Work cb-- s-- p--h’ will create a to-do with title “do this”, with the clipboard copied to the notes, with a due date in 3 days, an alarm at 10 am and in the calendar named “Work” (if it exists, otherwise in the default which is “Home’), with a high priority and open iCal and show this to-do as soon as it has been created

‘e-- meet someone l--someone’s house n-- the directions a--2 d-- +2 17:00 +2′ will create an event “meet someone” two days from now starting at 5 pm and lasting for 2 hours with an alarm 2 hours before hand with a location “someone’s house” with “the directions” in the notes.

Get a copy of this list here.

[Big hat tip to Benjamin for sharing]quicksilver, ical, action, script, to-dos, events, productivity, on the fly

I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.

It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia ). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.

To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.

First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:

1. Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
2. Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
3. A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
4. Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
5. Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.

Here are five that I particularly like:

1. BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
2. JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
3. Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
4. MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
5. Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.

address book, mail.app, apple mail, google, calendar, ical, contacts, tips, plugins, the little engine that could

Benjamin Harley has updated his applescripted utility ABGMerge which offers true two-way syncing between Address Book and Gmail.

The latest release makes a number of significant improvements.

It has repackaged as an application, and features a ‘Safe Mode’ with the option to restore your Address Book to its initial contents.

User interaction has been streamlined and improved, and the app no longer leaves extraneous data in your Address Book (altough it still leaves “<myABGmerge>” in Gmail notes so you know which ones are synchronized to your Address Book).

It’s also faster: the basic synchronization algorithms are significantly refined.

Benjamin says,

It is still complicated, and probably not for people without some savvy. It doesn’t necessarily handle foreign addresses all that well. And it probably still has some bugs. But it is far more robust now than it was before – and it sure beets doing a one off import / export between the two applications. Address Book is such a good repository for address information, but if you don’t have .mac – Gmail may be the best bet to get at that information when you are at work or away.

You can get ABGMerge from Benjamin’s web site .address book, gmail, google, syncing, contacts, web 2.0, applescript