John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has written up a detailed explanation of Leopard Mail’s new message: URL links, which allow you to link to individual email messages from other apps like Yojimbo and iCal.

He describes how the feature works, the various formats that Leopard accepts — message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message:<MESSAGE-ID>, message://<MESSAGE-ID> — and why message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e is the best of the bunch.

As he correctly points out there is no default menu option in Leopard Mail to access this feature. However MailTags users can find it under the Edit menu or use the keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘U to copy the URL to the clipboard (in Mail.app’s default message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format).

John also provides an applescript for copying the message: URL of a selected email to the clipboard in his preferred message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format, which is recognised by any Cocoa-based app using NSTextView.

Read the whole post and get the applescript on Daring Fireball.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, urls, hyperlinks, applescript, productivity

Apple may have taken away iCal’s Information Pane in Leopard, but that doesn’t mean you are forced to use the new pop-up Edit pane.

There are lots of other quicker options (Quicksilver, MailTags, Event Maker if you are still using Tiger).

Leopard users can now add Do-It to the list.

This stand-alone app offers a “quick entry” interface for the creation of iCal events.

Fire it up with a few keystrokes in Quicksilver or have it ready to click in the Dock, and it quickly provides you with an interface that is tab-friendly and easy to navigate:

The disk image includes Tiger- and Leopard-specific builds.

Do-It is freeware and available in the Automator section of Apple’s Downloads web site.ical, productivity, quick entry, quicksilver, mailtags, event maker, events, the much lamented ical info pane RIP

Someone at the University of Chicago has whipped up a Leopard Mail Stationery template as an exercise in testing the drag-n-drop images wells in the default stationery templates.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but offers a more image rich environment than the standard templates provide.

After installing it (double-click on the downloaded file), you can drag-n-drop away to your heart’s content:

Photo Cluster is freeware and is available from a web page at the University of Chicago.

Along the same lines, those expecting a baby girl and distressed by the lack of a pink Baby Announcement template in Leopard Mail will find relief in the work of Ed Dyer, who has tweaked the existing blue one to offer a pink alternative.

He writes about it on the Apple Discussions and has made the template available for download from his iDisk .eye-candy, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, stationery, HTML, templates, baby girls

FacebookSync syncs data between your Address Book and facebook account. It used to sync a lot of data (email addresses, IM details, phone numbers, etc) until facebook pointed out that this was a breach of its terms of use.

It still does a number of useful things though. It can add facebook profile pictures to Address Book contacts who have no photo, also address information.

Fire it up and you are asked to authenticate your facebook account. Then it delivers a list, comparing information about friends in your facebook account with your Address Book contacts, noting the differences:

You can then select sift through the contacts manually to select which Address Book contacts you would like it to update, or use the buttons on the right for a batch job.

It’s very clever. If you are addicted to Mail.app’s ability to display a photo of the author in the top righthand corner of each email, which somehow (for me) turns emails into conversations with real people, you will love it. Finally, I have an Address Book photo for a photo-shy friend! (I could simply have taken it from her facebook profile page but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.)

facebooksync is freeware and and you can get it from the developer’s web site .address book, mail.app, apple mail, contacts, friends, facebook, syncing, social web

Scott Little has updated his excellent SignatureProfiler plugin for Leopard Mail.

Veteran Hawk Wings readers will remember how many nifty tweaks and new options this plugin brings to Mail.app’s signature feature (see this previous Hawk Wings post if you are not a veteran reader).

The new version adds support for Leopard Mail and removes it for Panther Mail. You can get the update (1.4.4) from Scott’s web site . SignatureProfiler is donation-ware.signatures, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, html, CSS, Skype, hyperlinks, plugins

A poster on macOSXHints notes that Leopard Mail now supports Spotlight sophistication in its searches.

This means that you can use a limited set of operators to construct more complex and better-targeted searches than you ever could before. Spotlight in Leopard can filter results by metadata categories like “author:” or “date:”. Leopard Mail does the same thing.

For example, this search lets me quickly find all the emails sent from a Christ Church South Yarra email address that contain the word “beer”. Not as many as one might think! Still, the search enables me to find quickly that the answer is Boags.

Another search from work yesterday quickly finds all the emails from the Director of Communications at College which contain the word “font”. Without too much browsing I discover that Optima is the approved font for all external communications and can get on with actually writing one.

A third example. This search lists all the emails that have arrived since 3 December that mention Tiger, including the one from a Hawk Wings reader who wonders why I don’t post about Tiger Mail anymore.

Not everything about Leopard Mail is focussed on greater productivity, but this smarter way of digging through your email and finding what you are looking for is a great leap forward.

After a few posts carping on about this or that failing in Mail.app, it’s good to stumble on something like this and remember what a truly great email client it is.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, beer, Christ Church South Yarra, tiger mail, productivity, spotlight, searching

Like many people (but apparently not all), when I drag an item from the Finder to Mail.app’s Dock icon, it launches two messages, the first without the attachment, the second one with it.

Obviously, this is annoying and I have always regarded it as just that. However, today, a poster on the Apple Discussion Forums points out an even more annoying aspect of this new “feature” in Leopard Mail:

If I drag a file from Finder to Mail icon in Dock, Mail opens and creates two windows. I write my message in the window in front.

Then I get interrupted, and when I come back I need to write another message to a different recipient before I complete the first message. I use the second window for this message (convenient as it is already there…) I place a different file in this message and send it. My first message window then disappears!

Fine, I think – I´ll write it again. Only, it turns out that the recipient of my SECOND message received the FIRST message, including attachment and everything written in the body area (not in subject area). I work with clients for whom discretion is important – this is risky as sensitive information can end up in the wrong places!!!

Hmmmm… Maybe it is a good idea to use the Attachment button in the Toolbar until this one gets fixed.

UPDATE: Johann suggests in the comments that this is a MailTags problem. Testing — the kind of testing that one should do before pushing out a blog post — clearly demonstrates that it is (for me anyway), based on a statistical sample of one. But Scott knows about it, which means that will probably be fixed even before this update is posted!

UPDATED UPDATE: The controversy continues. The original poster and many others claim that they get this behaviour without MailTags installed. Follow it blow by blow in the Apple Discussions.

UP-TO-DATEST UPDATE: Glenn posts in the comments that this is a bug in Leopard Mail and quotes Apple’s response to his submission of a bug report:

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5630858. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5243377.

leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, bugs