As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they “break” when viewed in many other email clients.

You can read about this and why it happens in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

A poster on macOSXHints offers a complicated way around the the problem.

He recommends pasting in the hyperlink, then hitting space to turn it into a hyperlink. (This only works if you are composing in Mail’s “Rich Text” format).

Then he suggests typing “Click here” somewhere within the resulting hyperlink and deleting the rest of the hyperlink text to leave a hyperlinked “Click here”. He calls this “a small amount of work for a better presentation”.

There is an easier way. Just type “Click here” (or possibly something short but more informative) to begin with, highlight the text and then choose “Add Hyperlink…” from Mail’s Edit menu (or “Edit link” from the Contextual Menu that appears when you Control-click or right-click on the highlighted text). Paste in your URL. You’re done.

This is Hawk Wings’ Work around number two for broken hyperlinks, and will work well for people who use Rich Text. If you are composing in Plain Text, it will automatically switch your message to the Rich Text format.

People like me, who prefer to compose in plain text will want to consider Work around number one, using a service like TinyURL or SnipURL .

Some of my Windows-using workmates dislike clicking on SnipURL links as they can’t see in advance where the link will go, but they dislike it less than the broken links Mail otherwise produces in Thunderbird and Outlook.broken hyperlinks, URLs, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, workarounds, tinyURL, productivity

David Chartier over at TUAW has hit upon a Mail.app productivity tip that will be useful for some users.

He points out that it is possible to open a second viewer window via the File menu (or ⌥⌘N if you are that kind of person), so that you can process your email twice as fast. Or at least, attack it from two different angles at once.

He suggests one possible use:

This is particularly useful if you have a folder (or perhaps a Smart Folder) which you keep checking throughout the day; this way, you can simply keep one viewer open to your inbox (or whatever default location that suits you), with the second viewer set on that other fold.

Nice one.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, viewer window, smart mailbox, tip

The busy beavers at deviantART have been hard at it.

In the last month or so over 110 new mail stamp icons have appeared, covering everything from celebrities to musicians such as Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, ten rappers I’ve never heard of and Iron Maiden. Half-Life, Lost and the Citadel also get a look in.

Descriptions, a link and a sample of the contents in each set follow. (Hint: Read to the end if you are new to Hawk Wings for installation instructions.)

deviantART user hellhound has created three sets of replacement mail stamp icons.

The first set is a block buster, offering forty icons, including Jessica Alba, someone called Ambrosio, Eminem, three Elvis icons, Half-Life icons, Johnny Cash, Keira Knightly, Maggie Grace, Ray Charles and lots and lots of Scarlett Johansson:

The second set contains ten pieces of Iron Maiden artwork (album covers?):

His third set features thirty assorted celebrities — among them three Bob Dylan icons, Keeley, Lohan and Aguilera et al, two Veronicas icons and, of course, lots more Scarlett Johannson:

Another deviantART user karnakhan offers twenty more celebrities , five variations on each of four images, two of Elisha Cuthbert and two of Scarlett Johansson (who is going very well in the 2007 Mail stamp icon stakes):

Lastly, TheEnvyProject offers up ten rappers in two sets.

I’m jiggy wid it, but I don’t knows their names well enough to type them out. I think my younger brother may once have liked Tupac:

Some of these are PNG or ICO image files not ICNS icons. You will need to convert them using a tool like the excellent and free img2icns utility.

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which gets quite a boost out of this post and now contains 444 different icons.mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, jessica alba, scarlett johansson, bob dylan, elvis presley, halflife, rap artists, iron maiden

Scott Morrison has released another public beta of the undisputed prince of Mail.app plugins.

How do you make the best plugin better? By making it even more reliable, slicker and easier on the eye.

Scott has polished the interface. You will see substantial tweaks to the to-do pop-up. Alarms have been added for to-dos and events (message with or without audio alert), a nice calendar makes picking the due date for to-dos easier and the tab key now does what it is supposed to:

A long-standing issue with the possible double download of messages in some situations has been fixed. And .Mac accounts now authenticate properly.

Memory leaks have been plugged, leaving Mail “more stable, snappier and less memory-hungry over time”.

You won’t believe how fast Mail now opens large mailboxes.

And the main MailTags pane continues to see improvements. The old “Due Date” section gets a name change to “Deadline” in order to avoid confusion with iCal items.

Parts of the pane are more compactly designed and the Notes section collapses more elegantly.

Behind the scenes, a “Reindex Tags” button has been added to the About/Register Tab of the MailTags Preferences.

This performs a Spotlight import of tags if smart mailboxes are not working properly.

The expiry date for Public Beta 9 has been extended to 15 April 2007, when Scott expects that the final version will be out.

Not bad, eh?

This long list only picks the best bits out of a much longer changelog on the MailTags web site.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

A policewoman in Melbourne took a photo of herself — in uniform, shirt unbuttoned, seductively posed, name badge showing — and sent it to her boyfriend as a get well message.

He (cad) emailed it to a few friends and soon (whadda ya know?) it’s all over the police email system and the local news.

She now faces an Ethical Standards investigation and the possible loss of her job.

Claire Swire (lest we forget — Wikipedia ) first blazed the trail of email stupidity, but it seems that others are only too willing to follow in her footsteps.

I guess the moral of the story here is the same as it was in 2000.

As the BBC put it at the time, “Email in haste, repent at leisure”:

Of all the technological innovations of recent decades, few have the ability to wreck your life quite as quickly, and to quite the same extent, as e-mail…

…The lesson is clear: e-mail may be quick and cheap, but it has its drawbacks. It’s more bother to find a stamp and address an envelope, but at least it gives you time to reflect on the wisdom of sending the contents in the first place.

Readers lacking in imagination will find more (or less) coverage here and here .not apple mail, not mail.app, email, think first, internet, claire swire

Mailboxer is a smart little utility that quickly creates a smart mailbox in Mail.app for each of the contacts in your Address Book.

Developer Sven Porst feels that this is a real gap in Mail’s feature set. He really wanted a “smart mailbox per contact” option rather than the hassle of manual filing or endless rules. Then,

I discovered that Mail simply stores all the settings for its smart mailboxes in a single properly list file. And thus the simple idea to just write a little program which grabs the necessary contact information from the address book and updates that file with a bunch of smart mailboxes based on the contact information was born. Far from perfect and a bit hackish. But doing the job and – most importantly – reasonably easy to do.

Mailboxer is the result.

By default, it really does create a smart mailbox for every Address Book contact. In a nice little touch, it makes a backup of your existing smart mailbox settings at the same time (SmartMailboxes Pre Mailboxer.plist) and stores it away in your Mail folder in case something goes drastically wrong.

Each smart mailbox lists all emails sent from and sent to every email address listed for the contact:

This is a real time-saver. Still, for me, a smart mailbox for every contact is too many smart mailboxes. I would make good use of about a dozen, but not 465.

Luckily, Mailboxer saw me coming. If it finds a group in Address Book called Mailboxer, it will only create smart mailboxes for the contacts in that group.

It’s easily done. In a jiffy I created a group containing people whose emails I do need to find quickly and often — important work colleagues, my boss, my boss’s boss, my wife and so on:

Then I ran Mailboxer.

Now I have a manageable number of smart mailboxes that I will use at least ten or fifteen times a day. That’s a lot of typing into Mail’s search field that I have saved myself.

And if I find that I don’t use them as much as I thought, I can just delete the AB folder that contains them all.

Mailboxer is donation-ware and is available from Sven’s web site .

UPDATE: Sven has updated the app to fix a small bug with Company names. You can get the updated version here .smart mailboxes, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, address book, contacts, plugins

Claire Rottenberg has started up a new directory of “quality Mac web sites”.

As she explains :

Sifting through the hundreds or even thousands of websites with Mac information is a time-intensive effort, so I decided to create this blog to help other Mac users with that task. I’ll be continually adding reviews of Mac websites that meet certain quality criteria.

Hawk Wings was lucky enough to get a work over in her one of her first posts.

She judges that “the writing is in clear, non-technical language that is easily understood, even when the topic is an advanced one” but points out (correctly) that “some entries have typographical errors”.

Sadly even with the best intentions, typos do creep in, a sure sign perhaps that the writer is an “established journalist”.

I’m guilty as charged (apologies), but couldn’t resist pointing out a delicious little irony in the review:

[Thanks, Scott!]mail.app, apple mail, reviews, plugins, typos, not saved by grammar alone, hawkwings, humour