MailRecent: New Mail.app quick filing plugin
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 
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January 28th, 2007 at 2:21 am
perfect! thanks. this is exactly the solution that i’ve been looking for recently with some assorted filing tasks - particularly where i wanted to copy a message to a couple of folders and resort some older collections…a HUGE time saver - thank you greg!
January 28th, 2007 at 2:47 am
If you are already using Mail Act-on, you may be interested in this AppleScript I wrote to organize an archive by date.
January 28th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Doug, looks interesting! Thanks for the link.
January 30th, 2007 at 1:52 am
(I am the developer of the MailRecent plugin.)
Tim found a bug! (See his “Update” in the article above.) I have fixed this (he has confirmed it now works for him) and will be releasing an update as soon as possible.