Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (“I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found – and loves – MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxes

The Hotmail plugin HTTPMail has been updated to work with 10.5.3.

This plugin won’t work with all Hotmail accounts, only older ones. But in a clever move it tells you whether it works or not. Either it does, or it gives an error message saying that the account needs to be updated to Hotmail Plus (in which case, see Gmail )

From the FAQ and readme notes included in the disk image, it seems that there are currently two kinds of Hotmail accounts, pre-WebDAV ones (really old), WebDAV ones (less old). I think I read somewhere that 2004 is the magic date.

In any event, as Hawk Wings readers know, all Hotmail accounts will soon (but not as soon as 30 June) become DeltaSync accounts.

In the meantime, if your Hotmail account is old enough, this may be the solution for you.

I could only find an older version, 1.49, on the plugin’s sourceforge page . The most recent one is available from MacUpdate though.

[I should confess that I don't have a Hotmail account and--in breach of the usual Hawk Wings policy--haven't tested this for myself.]hotmail, microsoft, plugins, httpmail, mail.app, apple mail leopard mail, gmail

Nova Media has released version 2.0 of its Phone plugins software, which restores to Leopard users the lost ability to dial phone numbers and send text messages in Address Book. And not only that, but more widely across a range of apps.

Phone Plugins installs itself as a System Preference pane.

After installation, you need to hook up a mobile phone to your Mac via Bluetooth by following the simple instructions onscreen. It recognised my old Nokia E60 without a problem:

Then, when the connection is established, right-clicking on a contact’s phone number in Address Book produces two new entries in the contextual menu:

The text/SMS interface is nice and simple and gets the job done. It offers a running total of remaining characters and a spell-check option:

Clicking “Dial number with E60″ initiates a call on your mobile/cell (unsurprisingly!).

Both options are available outside Address Book, system-wide in the Services menu. Just highlight the number and select the option you want from Services (or, if you do this a lot, bind it to a keyboard shortcut with an app like Service Scrubber ).

Phone Plugins works with a list of supported phones which Nova Media provides so check that yours is on the list before you try to install it.

Phone Plugins is shareware and features a very robust nag screen.

It costs €9,95 (c. USD 15.50) and a demo version is available from Nova Media’s web site .

For a donation-ware option, take a look at the emitSMS Widget in an earlier Hawk Wings post.address book, dialing, phone numbers, text, sms, contacts, mobile phones, cell phones, leopard, apple

After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.

Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver , Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.

It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:

Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:

Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.

The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.

The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:

Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.

Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.

Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.

Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page . quicksilver, secrets, preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, tweaks

Some people are unhappy with the way Mail.app truncates the names of attachments so that you can’t quite see at a glance what you are clicking on.

They think, in turn, that it’s discourteous to do this to others.

Attaché is the utility for them. It is an AppleScript that provides full information in the body of the email for all enclosed attachments.

Put it in your Dock or on your Desktop (or wherever you can find it easily).

Drop some emails on the applet and it packages them up so that it’s clear at once what the recipient is getting:

The applet allows you to set a number of default parameters.

Open up the app and you are greeted with a Preferences pane that let’s you specify a default language (English, German, French, Italian).

I’ve blogged this before, but the author has now added additional preferences. You can now set the account that Mail will use to compose the message and pick a default signature.

Further options allow you to set a default subject and to import text to form the default body of the message.

This will appeal especially to knowledge workers (like me) who spend a lot of time shunting documents and whatnot around from one place to another, although others who want or need to identify attachments more closely in their emails will like it too.

Attaché is freeware. It was created by Martin Michel, who hopes soon to add the ability to zip files dropped on the applet and to set default recipients. It is available from its own page on MacScripter.

mail.app, apple mail, attachments, full text, productivity, civility, applescript

Well, who would have thought? News of Hotmail’s death for mail.app users is exaggerated.

Microsoft has relented and deferred the transition from WebDAV to its own DeltaSync standard. This means that Mail.app users with HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs plugins won’t be cut off on 30 June after all.

After listening to customer feedback from the original accouncement, Microsoft told its users “it became clear that you needed additional time to evaluate alternative solutions”.

Still, this only postpones the executioner’s axe. Don’t fritter away all the extra time Microsoft has given you in making a decision.

With apologies for any distress.

[Via The Fastmail.fm Weblog ] Apple Mail, fastmail, GMAIL, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, mail.app, microsoft, webmail, webdav

A Japanese graphic artist has created 40 mail stamp icons, featuring various cute animals.

He provides icons for two different coloured icons of an apple, a cat, a chicken, a cow, an elephant, a golden retriever, a hawk, a horse, a monkey hearing no evil, another speaking no evil and one seeing no evil, a husky, a ladybird, a poodle, a rabbit, the weirdest looking sheep I have ever seen, a snail, a snake and a tiger.

The collection also contains two icons of a “black guy”. Here’s a taste of the overall style:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy, and fun.

You can get the icons from his web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now contains 507 mail stamp icons (assuming all the links still work).mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, animals, cartoons, tiger, chicken, hawk, monkey, stamp icons