The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.mail.app, apple mail, rules, productivity, mail act-on, tutorial, tips, sorting, folders, imap

Two and a half years ago Microsoft executives were privately green with envy over the features soon to be released in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.

According to a report on UK web site PCPro , Microsoft’s envy was revealed in a series of emails, submitted as evidence in the Iowa antitrust lawsuit.

Mail.app and Spotlight particularly impressed Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism:

Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Top Microsoft executive Jim Allchin was also impressed: “I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” he wrote.

The most recent batch of emails are available as a PDF file online:

In a nice tribute to Apple, the emails also reveal that Microsoft’s top executives were so taken with Tiger that they refused to share their installation discs for fear they might never get them back.

Previous emails from Allchin in the same case told how he would buy a Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft and that Microsoft’s attempts in 2003 to come up with an iPod rival were very, very depressing.

All of this and more is available on the Comes vs Microsoft lawsuit web site. apple, microsoft, allchin, windows, searching ,spotlight, mail.appm apple mail, green eyed monster

Doug Lerner wants to take Mail.app and his messages with him and plug it into any Mac he can find.

He posts in the Apple Discussions:

Apparently Thunderbird supports a “portable mailbox” feature. In other words, you can keep your mail on a USB RAM drive, and just plug it in to whatever computer you are using – Mac or Windows – and Thunderbird just uses that mailbox instead of one on your HD.

My friend’s USB RAM was only 2GB and he was getting worried about reaching capacity, so he started using his 20GB iPod instead, which works just as well.

I wonder if such a thing is possible with Apple’s Mail app.

Naturally, the idea that Thunderbird can do anything better than Mail.app sends me into a frenzy.

Clever people have developed a couple of ways to use Mail.app on memory sticks or iPods.

Portable Mail is a clever hack that opens a local copy of Mail.app on whatever Mac you are using with preferences stored on a USB stick. If the stick is big enough to cal also store your Mail folder and everything else on it as well.

Developer Carlo Gandolfi has recently released SyncPAppsX , a helper app that syncs the local and portable settings for a range of his portable iApps including Portable Mail, making it even easier not to miss a beat. Nice.

Jeffrey Glover has worked out a way to store his Mail and Mail Downloads on an iPod. By creating some symbolic links, he shows you how to force Mail to use the messages on the iPod, regardles of which Mac it is plugged into.

Obviously, by creating different symbolic links, you could move the Mail folder to any remote volume, a network drive perhaps, and so share the same messages between two or more Macs on the one network. It’s an interesting way to share POP messages between multiple Macs, although I wouldn’t want to guess what would happen if more than one Mac was writing to the Mail folder at the same time.mail.app, apple mail, portable apps, usb stick, memory stick, ipod, mobility, productivity, thunderbird

Making use of Yojimbo’s newly-expanded “applescriptability”, Steve Kalkwarf has knocked out an applescipt that copies notes and passwords tagged with “ipod” to an iPod.

It creates a sub-folder called “Yojimbo” in the Notes folder of your iPod and copies all the matching items to it. Of course, with a little bit of tweaking in Script Editor, you could easily set the script to transfer notes with a different tag.

A couple of things to note:

If the note is longer than ~4KB, it gets chopped up into chapters.

A poster on the Yojimbo Mailing warns that notes containing a colon in their title may not behave well in the transfer.

I don’t have an iPod to test this. I only buy Apple products that can run Mail.app. Still, by all accounts it works a treat. not apple mail, yojimbo, applescript, ipod, notes, syncing, PDA road warrior, mobility, productivity

Nick Flood posts a problem in the user forums at HEXUS:

I stupidly deleted mail.app and I now need it. I can’t find the download anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone help me out?

Once upon a time, you had to get hold of Pacifist , a neat little app that extracts applications from packages, disk images and archives.

You could use it to navigate through your original OS X discs to find Mail.app, extract and install it.

But now (and not everyone knows this) there is an easier way.

Tiger allows for the “custom installation” of individual apps without the need for third-party helpers.

Just insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ :

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

Of course, sometimes Mail.app is so buggered up with hacks, scripts, plugins and add-ons that you may want to delete it and re-install on purpose.

An earlier Hawk Wings post (see “The Final Solution: Reinstalling Mail.app“) covers the steps to do that successfully. mail.app, apple mail, custom install, ical, address book, reinstall, ichat, itunes, safari

John Maisey has written an apple-scripted plugin for Mail.app, You’re Invited, that makes working with Outlook users easier.

It is similar to another plugin, OMiC . However, the feature sets do not over-lap completely. There are some things that OMiC does that this one doesn’t, so You’re Invited has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.

As John explains on his web site:

This Mail.app rule was designed to avoid:

• Text only invites appearing in Mail.
• Invites arriving in Mail not being automatically sent to iCal.
• Invitations arriving in iCal that create the ‘email address that isn’t on your “me” card in Address Book’ error.
• Having to remember obscure key combinations.
• Having to repeatedly drag/drop .ics files onto iCal.

A neat little interface adds a rule to your preferences which runs a script on incoming messages:

Invitations buried in your emails are whizzed over to iCal for processing.

Unfortunately it conflicts with something in the guts of MailTags, which means that I won’t be using it.

But if you are not using MailTags , you might (i) ask yourself, Why not? and (ii) find You’re Invited useful.

UPDATE: You can work around for the conflict by uninstalling MailTags, installing You’re Invited and activating it, and then installing MailTags again.

The current beta is freeware (expires 21 February) and available from John’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, outlook, ical, invitations, invites, applescript, mailtags

Florian Beer has posted two tips which stop Mail.app syncing Exchange’s public folders.

One of them has been covered on Hawk Wings before, but the other one brings the list of possible work-arounds to four:

1. Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
2. Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
3. Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
4. Lock the local cache. Florian’s second tip explains how to lock your local cache folders so that Exchange can’t sync with them.

Caveat Lector — I have absolutely no experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and no interest in acquiring some. mail.app, apple mail, microsoft, exchange server, imap, public folders, perl, local cache, email