Secrets, a clever little System Preference Pane that makes tweaking “hidden” features of Mac OS X easy (see earlier Hawk Wings post for more), has been updated to 1.0.6 and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.

Secrets provides easy assess to many of Mac Os X’s settings that you can otherwise only change by messing around in Terminal with long command strings, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It includes tweaks for many Mac core and a wide range of third-party apps. The most popular tweaks across all the apps are listed separately as well.

Of course, here we are most interested in its options for Mail.app:

Secrets Mail Preferences

As you can see from the screenshot, Secrets allows you to

• specify a default BCC email address
• force Mail to display messages in plain text
• set the Bundle compatibility and enable bundles
• enable and disable the data detectors
• switch the new (annoying) Snow Leopard behaviour of including names in copied email addresses on and off
• set a sent mail sound
• specify a minimum for HTML messages and a preferred text encoding
• request read receipts
• set the interval for refreshing Mail’s RSS feeds
• Decide whether to display attachments inline or not.

And more.

Some people will think of it as a hack and might be wary. However it comes with the reassurance that Alcor, the developer also (once) behind Quicksilver, is its creator. That’s a strong pedigree.

Secrets is freeware and available from the Blacktree web site .

UPDATE: I read on TUAW that the Blacktree site is overloaded. Secrets is also available from the app’s page on code.google.com. secrets, preferences, hidden preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, tweaks, tips, bundles

equinux, purveyors of fine HTML stationary for Mail.app, has released a new collection of Christmas stationery templates in plenty of time for the festive season.

“Season’s Greetings Vol. 2″ contains templates offering Christmas greetings, invitations, wishlists for your kids to send to Santa, templates for one of those much-loved “annual news-roundup” emails.

Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are not forgotten. Templates are included for those festivals too.

For those not in the know, Apple Mail’s stationery feature allows the app to send pre-made HTML emails, often quite fancy. Many of the equinux templates allow for customization by the insertion of your own photos and user-definable fonts:

The pack costs €7,95 (c. USD 11.80) and is available from equinux’s web site where you can also see the company’s other stationery packs.

If you are keen on this kind of thing, and know that your friends don’t mind receiving them, but you don’t want to shell out money for the option, you will find some freeware seasonal stationery templates listed in the following, previous Hawk Wings posts:

1. Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates.

2. More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free.

[via macnews.de ]stationery, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, addons, Christmas, hanukkah, Kwanzaa, festive season, more bandwidth-sucking tomfoolery

Hawk Wings reader Richard Drdul sends an image of a very Old School Canadian postage stamp, drawn up as a Mail stamp icon.

It is, he tells me, Canada’s first ever postage stamp issued in 1851, and was designed by Sir Sandford Fleming, who also invented time zones.

It was also the first official postage stamp in the world to picture an animal.

The postmark reads “Greetings from Upper Canada,” which is what the province of Ontario (where Apple’s Canadian HQ is) used to be called.

You can download the original PNG file or the ICNS file here.

Changing the icon itself is easy. (UPDATE: Unless you are using Snow Leopard, in which case it is not so easy, but can still be done. I’ll post a a Snow Leopard guide tonight.)

I’ve added it to the list of alternative stamp icons for Mail.app, making a total now of 509.

[Thanks, Richard]mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacks

For some reason that is difficult to fathom, Apple changed the way Mail.app copies the text of email address in Snow Leopard.

In the olden days, right clicking on the sender of an email produced a contextual menu with the option to “Copy Address”. And that’s what it did. Then you could paste happily it an email or whatever else you were working on.

Not anymore.

Now, in Snow Leopard’s Mail, when you do the same thing, it copies the person’s name as well and encloses the email address in angle brackets. Annoying.

Ken Aspeslagh at Mac Daddy World has discovered the fix, buried away in Mail’s preferences file.

In order to return to the old way of copying an address, all you need to do is close Mail. Open Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

Open Mail again, and everything is as it should be. If only all niggles in Mail were that easy to solve!

[Via Big Mac Daddy ]apple mail, mail.app, snow leopard, 10.6, little annoyance

The end of Semester is one week away.

I’m starting to get itchy blogging fingers.

I spent most of today updating WordPress from 2.5 to 2.8.5 (it’s been a while!), plowing through 443 comments in the moderation queue, and cleaning up a few other odds and sods.

I’m on the start line again, and the engine’s humming. Apple Mail, mail.app, hawkwings, eager beaver

Jim Riggs has long been frustrated by Mail.app’s lack of options for previewing messages. So he has written the TruePreview plugin to fix it.

He writes:

One of the most common shortcomings/omissions/bugs/failures in Mail is the inability to truly preview messages. If the preview pane is displayed in the message viewer window, as soon as a message is selected and displayed, it is marked as read. Most every other e-mail client on the planet provides an option to delay marking messages as read.

TruePreview installs itself as a classic plugin bundle in your ~/Library/Mail folder.

It provides a new tab in Mail’s Preferences in which you can set a default time delay in each of your accounts for messages to be marked as read:

A very nifty piece of work!

Jim has tested this on the most recent version of Mail.app in 10.5.6, but is keen to get feedback from users with other configurations.

The plugin is open-source (BSD licence) and can be found on the SourceForge site (UPDATE: Or, if you are having problems with SourceForge, try here ). apple mail, mail.app, preview, mark as read, plugin

Msgpush.com is a new web service that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 software to offer instant alerts on the iPhone when email arrives in your inbox.

When the iPhone was first released, there was a lot of hype about it offering true push email on the go for users. Everyone hoped that this would be provided through the IMAP IDLE extension, which would have made the feature available to all IMAP email services that support IMAP IDLE.

In fact, it turned out that this service was available first of all only to Yahoo.com mail users, and then later in the iPhone 2.0 software to Exchange users, and it doesn’t use IMAP IDLE.

The best my iPhone can do is poll my IMAP accounts through its “Fetch” feature every fifteen minutes.

Hoping to overcome this limitation, msgpush.com offers iPhone users the option to receive faster notification of new email by providing each user with a “fake Exchange account”.

Here’s how it works: You sign up at msgpush.com. It monitors your IMAP account through IMAP IDLE, and then sends notification of new mail to your iPhone through the Exchange protocol. Sounds clever, but there are some caveats:

1. You need to surrender your username and password for the IMAP account to msgpush.com, which not everyone will feel comfortable about.
2. You need to set up a new Exchange account on the iPhone to receive these notifications. But Exchange only allows you to run one profile at a time. So, if you have one configured already (as I do for my Zimbra account at work), this service is a non-starter.
3. It doesn’t actually read or push the email itself, only a notification that the email is waiting in your account’s inbox. So you still need to retrieve the email manually.
4. It’s still in beta and, according to some users, is proving a little erratic.

Still, even with these quibbles, it may be the solution that some users who can’t wait fifteen minutes are looking for.

I haven’t tested it (see 2. above), but you might like to. Sign up at the msgpush.com web site.

[With thanks to the Fastmail blog and forum posters ]

UPDATE: Tom Yager writes more on push email and the iPhone 3.0 software at InfoWorld. imap, imap idle, exchange, iphone, pushmail, notifications,