Hawk Wings reader René Boekhorst sent me a nice collection of mail stamp style icons featuring the characters from the Peanuts.

They are not tilted at 11.7 degrees (more or less) like other Mail.app icons, but they are still sweet.

All your best friends are there — Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder and Lucy. Even people I can’t recall at all get an icon (who is Marcie?).

Here they all are:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

Get them from Pixel Girl’s web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now breaks through the 450+ mail stamp icon barrier.mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, charlie brown, linus, snoopy, peanuts, woodstock

MailTags, the prince of Mail.app plugins, is now available in a Leopard-friendly public beta.

Scott outlines in a post on his web site how MailTags retains its productivity edge for Leopard Mail users. Although Leopard Mail includes notes and to-dos, MailTags still does it better. Its notes are smarter, its to-dos more flexible and its project features unmatched.

For example, tagging emails and RSS feeds with the same MailTags project makes it possible to see both sorts of data in one hit in Mail’s search window.

A list of Leopard Mail’s abilities without and with MailTags makes the advantages clear:

The beta has been hassle-free for me since upgrading to Leopard last Friday. Now in its fifth version, most of the kinks have been ironed out by Scott’s squad of beta-test commandos. MailTags to-dos don’t work for the moment, neither does the option to “view the originating message”. But they will.

Download and enjoy.

It’s all good for me, but heed Scott’s warning nonetheless: “We strongly recommend you maintain backups of your mail data or avoid using MailTags in critical situations.” mailtags, mail.app. apple mail, productivity, plugins, projects, notes, to-dos, public beta

Leopard Mail disables plugins when it is installed (as Tiger Mail did before it). That means all the productivity and eye-candy goodness that plugins provide is taken from you. Nasty! A poor bargain in return for Leopard Mail’s bling-bling HTML stationery.

However, not all hope is lost. Developers are scrambling to get Leopard-ready plugins into your hands.

And, in the meantime, you can try for yourself whether your favourites still work. Or not.

The Terminal commands that are needed to “re-enable” bundles and plugins in Leopard Mail are two

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1

defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

Close Mail. Type these into Terminal. Load up your bundles. Start Mail. Watch and see what happens.

Some work. Mail Act-on works after this Terminal trick. The current version will break the link to any Leopard Mail to-do created on the message, when the email is moved. But that’s a small price to pay. Scott Morrison is probably beavering away to fix this as I type.

MailAppetizer gives mixed results. It works, but no longer parses the HTML in the message properly:

So, it’s trial and error. I don’t have the patience to go through the whole list of plugins for Mail.app and report what’s working. But I’d be glad to hear from you in the commments if your favourites work. Or not.

Who dares wins!plugins, mail.app, apple mail, bundles, productivity

Adam Nohejl at Lokiware has updated his plugin which manages the way Apple Mail displays attachments.

As well as redesigning the plugin so that offers better control of how attachments are handled, he has also tweaked it for Leopard.

Mail Attachment Iconizer 2.0 offers several improvements over Mail.app’s native attachment handling. It offers particular advantages for people who often receive large PDF or PostScript files:

Using the new Preference Pane in Mail’s Preferences, you can determine exactly how attachments will behave. For example, you could choose to see PDFs inline, but Bitmap images as icons, or vice-versa:

You can also opt to set the content so that the recipient of your email sees it in the way you want.

Mail Attachment Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99, discounts for owners of MAI 1.0) and is available from Adam’s web site attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, pdf, icons, productivity