A poster on macOSXHints points out a smart use for the “tokenised” email addresses that Mail.app places in its To: and Cc: fields.

Coincidently, I stumbled across another unexpected use for this at work today.

The macOSXHints poster explains how to quickly enter email addresses in to a web form by first entering the name into a new Mail.app message. Mail auto-completes the names, providing those nice aqua tokens.

These can be be selected and dragged over to the web form, where they transform into a comma-separated list of email addresses. Clever.

But there’s more. Today at work I had to suggest the creation of a new internal mailing list. Rather than type all the email addresses out, I tried the same trick.

I entered the names in the To: field of the message, let Mail auto-complete them, then selected them all and dragged them into the body of the email. Voila! — a nice, comma-separated list of email addresses appeared:

This is not a high-use tip. I’ve been using a Mac for four years now, and this is the first time I was moved to try it. Still, it’s nice to know that it is there, waiting for me to discover all over again when I need to do this in 2011.mail.app, apple mail, email addresses, tips, web forms, mailing list, productivity

David Cleland has written an excellent tutorial on Address Book’s little known ability to send SMS (or text) messages through a mobile (or cell) phone using Bluetooth.

He covers the process of pairing a mobile phone with Address Book over Bluetooth and how to use Address Book’s SMS interface.

Once it is all set up, sending an SMS through Address Book is as easy as right-clicking on the mobile number of an Address Book contact and selecting “Send SMS”.

Address Book offers a simple dialog for entering the message:

It’s a little tricky to set up, but easier to use than trying to type on the cramped keypad of a mobile phone. So frequent texters will reap the greatest benefit.not mail.app, not apple mail, address book, text message, SMS, bluetooth, tips

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

Here’s is a simple tip that was new to me.

There are two ways to add a vCard with your contact information to a Mail.app signature.

An old post on macOSXHints details how to add it as a hyperlink to a remotely-stored vCard file, so that recipients can download it into their Address Books easily.

The end result is nice and clean and saves bandwidth:

If you don’t give two figs about bandwidth, you can simply export your card from Address Book.

Then drag it onto a signature in the Signature pane of Mail’s preferences, and your vCard goes out with every signed email:

Of course, it is possible to share more information than you mean to or more than your recipients want. It might be a good idea to create a special Address Book card for this before exporting it. Address book, mail.app, apple mail, vcard, signature, contact information, tip, hyperlink

Mark/Space has released SyncTogether , the commercial version of the app formerly known as MySync, which syncs Address Book, iCal, Mail (and more) data between multiple Macs.

It’s quite clever as you can see from one, two, three previous Hawk Wings posts.

SyncTogether will interest two sorts of people; those with more than Mac and members of workgroups and families who need to keep data in sync across multiple Macs, whether they are on the local network or working remotely.

After establishing a main server and workgroup, registering other Macs to sync to and choosing what data to include, its interface allows for easy control of the sync process:

While it was in development MySync was freeware. SyncTogether is not; a licence for up to three Macs costs $49.95.

But make sure you read the list of known issues before parting with your money.

If you are very hardcore or frightened by the price tag, take a look at “Making your own .Mac“.

You can download a 14 day demo it from the Mark/Space web site .

UPDATE: Apologies. I could have sworn that I was rewarded with a screen mentioning a 14 day demo when I clicked “register later”, but I was hallucinating.mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, dotMac, .Mac, apple

MacWorld writer Christopher Breen offers three ways to print out contact information from Address Book so that you can take it with you in a day planner (Filofax, Franklin, Day Runner, etc).

Well, two ways really. He covers using Address Book’s own built-in printing option, first through the included settings and then using instructions in a tip in the Apple Discussions forum.

He also suggests using the freeware Palm Desktop for Mac software , which offers more extensive options that are easier to configure than the Apple Discussions tip.

You can add one more option by quickly scanning the Address Book entries in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

Address Book Reports (see an earlier Hawk Wings post ) offers many more options than the features built-in to Address Book.

It is shareware (USD 15) but will be money well spent for people with unusual day planners or boutique needs or for people who simply like to have all the options at their finger-tips.address book, day planner, filofax, franklin, contacts, printing, hipster, not apple mail, productivity

Today MacFixIt carries one of those gut-wrenching horror stories from a reader that you read about from time to time:

Tonight, while cleaning up my address book to sync to the blackberry, I got the spinning ball of death, which resulted in having to restart the computer. When I did, address book was empty the next time I opened it. Database gone. Backup database gone.

Not long ago, a Hawk Wings reader experienced something similar after syncing his PowerBook with a Nokia 6682. Although he enjoyed the added bonus of a very puzzling exchange with Apple Tech Support following his wipe-out.

Of course, prevention is the best cure. That is to say, you can’t really lose what you have backed up. Back up your ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder often.

However, if you find yourself in a jam and the backup is not as up-to-date as it might be, there is still hope.

Address Book is smart. It keeps a little backup of its own in a AddressBook.data.previous file inside the directory mentioned above:

To restore it, all you need to do is quit Address Book, delete the dead AddressBook.data file and rename the backup to AddressBook.data. Whew! not apple mail, address book, data loss, recovery, deleted contacts, tips, backup, productivity