Sorry for the hiatus.

I have been writing for money. But that sordid prostitution of my priceless gifts is over, at least for another month.

Normal service resumes.

Here’s a thought…. If you like Hawk Wings and you benefit from the things that appear here, you could make a donation. Then I wouldn’t have to sell myself on the street. (Well, not as often anyway.)

A few shekels will do. I’m not proud. Obviously.

mail.app, apple mail, personal, freelancing

Having recently posted four work-arounds to stop Mail subscribing to the public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server, I am delighted to discover that soon none of them will be necessary.

Leopard Mail has an elegant built-in solution to this problem.

Mail Stamps developer Andrew Escobar has posted a detailed account of how the new feature will work.

When an Exchange account is highlighted, choosing the “Get Account Info” item in the contextual menu item (or ⌘-I) pops up a new window that allows users to unsubscribe to the public folders:

Problem solved. And another upside?

After the fix, I never have to deal with Public Folders again. While I’m still using Tiger on a daily basis, once Leopard ships in the spring of 2007, I’ll finally be able to ditch Entourage and use Mail as my sole email client.

mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, microsoft, exchange server, public folders, workaround, tips

Quicksilver , the app launcher and all-round productivity-enhancing wonder app, is full of surprises.

Just when you think you are getting on top of it, some little thing comes along to remind you how little you know of its mysterious wonderfulness.

A few days ago I read something on the Quicksilver forum that was completely new to me. Simple. Smart. But utterly unknown to me.

If you hold a keystroke down for a few seconds it actually launches the selected app without the need to hit the Enter key. How about that?

Just hold down the “m” key and Mail launches:

Wonderful. Quicksilver is a like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. not apple mail, productivity, quicksilver, keystroke, the simple things in life are the best

Spanning Sync has finally released a public beta of its Google Calendar-iCal two-way sync app, only to experience so overwhelming a demand for new signups that the beta was closed again.

Spanning Sync is said to offer reliable bidirectional syncing of user-selected Calendars in iCal and Google’s calendar (see a previous Hawk Wings post).

The interface in the beta looks promising:

In a post that went up on the company’s blog soon after the announcement of the public beta, relief was promised for those eager to try out the service:

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the re-opening.

[Via TUAW ]ical, google, calendar, syncing, two-way, beta, spanning sync, not apple mail

I had an email from a Hawk Wings reader today, asking how to do something that I am surprised to discover I’ve not posted about on Hawk Wings before.

Mail.app offers an optional field in the Compose window for specifying a different Reply-to email address:

This is fine if you only need to do it now and again. But it’s a pain if you want to do this regularly, because you need to enter the email address each time you compose an email.

(Now former?) Mail Team Developer Cricket has created an applescript which will add a form of this header to every email by default. It also lets you add a default bcc: address (useful for quietly copying your emails to Gmail perhaps).

Running the script presents you with a list of options:

Select the Reply-to one and a dialog appears into which you can enter your desired Reply-to address:

Cricket provides another script to undo the change later on if you want to.

The scripts are freeware, unsupported by Apple and available from Cricket’s web site .

A poster on macOSXHints provides some Terminal commands to add a Reply-to or Bcc: email address if you prefer to do things that way.

[Thanks for the prompt, John!]mail.app, apple mail, tip, default reply-to address, Bcc, gmail, applescript, terminal

Greg Welch, creator of the MailFollowup plugin for smarter email conversations, has added a second title to his plugin stable.

MailRecent provides a quick filing solution for Mail.app.

It adds three new menus — “Copy to Recent”, “Move to Recent”, and “Go to Recent” — to Apple Mail. Each of these contains dynamically-updated lists of recently used mailboxes:

The number of mailboxes listed in the menus is controlled by the “Number of Recent Items” setting for Documents in the Appearance panel of the OS X System Preferences.

By default MailRecent sorts the mailboxes alphabetically, but Greg provides instructions for some Terminal commands to sort them by time or frequency of use.

One small thing. The plugin only lists the name of the mailbox. So, for example, if you have three accounts each with an “Archive” mailbox, you will not be able to tell from the list which one is which.

UPDATE: Greg emails to say that this kind of ambiguity shouldn’t arise. The Usage section on the plugin’s page says that, “If you transfer to one or more mailboxes that happen to have the same name, the menu item titles will be extended with a minimal distinguishing path to the mailbox. This is true whether the “duplicate” mailboxes (same names) are in the same or different mail accounts.” The extension doesn’t appear for me, but it might be there for you. It works for Greg.

Personally, I use Mail Act-on for my filing, but this provides another neat solution to getting mail out of your inbox and where it belongs quickly.

MailRecent is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugin, filing, productivity, mailboxes, sorting, mail act-on

Kuswanto at Zeusbox has written a snappy little tutorial on how to hack iCal’s icon so that its colour matches your theme or replacement icon set but still updates with the right date every day.

It involves digging around inside iCal’s application package, extracting the right icon and either modifying it yourself or using someone else’s. Kuswanto is using the blank iCal icon from the Ekisho system icons replacement set .

The creator of the Ekisho set has also created a set of Mail.app stamp icons:

They come tilted and straight, with and without the postmark. You can download them all in a zip file from the designer’s web site.ical, icon, hack, mail.app, apple mail, stamp icon, icons