Jumsoft has released a pack of additional mail stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The pack contains 50 “high-quality and exclusive design options for every occasion”, covering Family, Congratulations, Invitations, Emotions, Vacations and Seasons themes.

An additional group are described as “Neutral”, or multi-purpose.

You can view small thumbnails of all the templates on the Jumsoft web site, but some examples of the “Neutral” category are displayed below:

    

The pack costs USD 39 and is available from Jumsoft’s web site .

Value-conscious readers will want to compare this pack of 50 with the pack of 111 templates from equinix (reviewed in an earlier Hawk Wings post). The equinix pack retails for 24.95 euros (c. USD 40), twice as many template choices for almost the same price.

Of course, really value-conscious readers will want to make their own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ) or look at the increasing number of stationery templates offered for free.

Novcon.net has started a collection of free stationery templates, which now contains sixteen examples. Users can rate the ones they like best. The current winner is an attractive “parchment” template.

The Novcon site also contains instructions on how to install the stationery.

Templates in the Jumsoft pack and on the Novcon.net site are now listed in the Templates section of the comprehensive Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.

Related posts

• Photo Cluster: free stationary for Leopard Mail
• 111 extra HTML stationery templates for Leopard Mail
• SignatureProfiler for Leopard Mail
• Leopard Mail HTML Stationery Gallery
• Christmas Stationery for Leopard Mail

MailFX is a new notification utility for Mail.app that displays a Quartz Composer animated graphic on the Desktop when new mail arrives.

This is the sort of thing that will please people looking for a notification utility between the complete pop-up MailAppetizer offers and the minimal approach of menubar utilities like MailUnreadStatusBar.

It installs itself as a classic bundle in your Mail Directory, with its own preference Pane in Mail.app’s Preferences:

Here you can select which of the included graphics you want it to display, how long it should display and how transparently. It can also play a sound when the notification is shown (Nostalgic readers should check out the Eudora new mail sound in the dropdown box).

You can also opt to reveal Mail.app when you click on the notification.

The plugin crates a rule that controls which emails will trigger a notification. By default it is set to trigger for all new mail:

Obviously, tweaking the rule can reduce this and make the alerts more useful (for example, set the rule to trigger only on emails from your work account and not emails from your blog, or only from your boss, or whatever).

In addition, it claims to restore the ability to hide Mail.app on start-up, a feature broken in Leopard (and Tiger too, IIRC).

MailFX is freeware and only works with Leopard Mail. It’s available from the developer’s web site

Excursus: An Ethical Blogging Dilemma

Every now and then an app or plugin comes along that sharpens the difference between being a journalist and a blogger. The bouncy, bouncy notification madness of NotifX was just such an app. This one is another.

When you are a journalist, you just write what your editor tells you to, and don’t ask (too many) questions. And then you get a paycheck in the mail.

When you’re a blogger, it’s more complicated (for one thing, there are no paychecks).

On the one hand, you want to be comprehensive. That’s the point of the blog. On the other hand, there’s the question of good taste. The blog is “mine” in a way that the IT articles I once wrote are not. To be honest, this utility offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon than use it.

To post or not to post?

I resolve this dilemma as follows: Smack myself on the back of the head for being a snob, and post.

Related posts

• MailUnreadStatusBar notification app goes Universal
• MailAnnounce AppleScript updated
• Mail.appetizer 1.2b4: Plays better with Mail.app
• Mail Widget 1.4: SSL support. Rebuilt. Fast.
• Mail Unread Menu: Menubar notification

Ever felt that the red flag in Mail.app doesn’t offer you enough flexibility?

Flagit! is a plug-in that offers Mail.app users customisable flags of as many different colours as you like, as well as question and exclamation marks.

It is packaged as a plug-in for SIMBL , an Input Manager that allows application-specific hacks for Cocoa apps (like Mail.app).

It is not heavy on documentation. Pay close attention to the installer screen, because it offers you all the information you will get on how to use its new features:

Once installed, you can access its features through the “Mark” option in the contextual menu. Highlight the email you want to flag, Control-click (or right-click) on the email and choose the flag you want:

The Customize option opens a preference pane with room to edit the default flags and create as many new ones as you need:

It also provides the option to colourise the text of the email that you have flagged. Combined with the option to colourise the backgrounds of emails (which I do through Mail Act-on — Leopard users this way ), it can produce a riot of colour in your inbox.

If I wasn’t very happy about marking emails done or needing attention or waiting for a response with the keywords feature of MailTags , I could imagine using this, and benefitting from the additional visual help of coloured flags.

Flagit! works with Tiger and Leopard and is shareware (USD 8). You can download a 15-day free demo from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Users report in the comments that Flagit! doesn’t play nicely with the WideMail plugin. The comments also contain some tips on uninstalling Flagit!

Related posts

• WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview
• WideMail 0.1.0: Real Widescreen Preview Column
• While I was busy…
• Tabbable MailTags: Another improvement?
• Plugin List: Updates, improvements

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.]

Related posts

• The Death of Hotmail for Mail.app users and a new solution
• Reprieve: Hotmail for Mail.app not (quite) dead
• HTTPMail returns for Leopard: Hotmail in Mail
• Webmailer: Easily set webmail services as your default mailer
• Mail Forward 3.1.1.b1: Reading your webmail in Mail.app

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.

Related posts

• Attaché: Droplet for quick Mail.app attachment lists
• YAI (Outlook meeting plugin) updated for Leopard
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Supercharging Mail’s workflow with Automator

The Hawk Wings plugin and add-on list contains over 140 plug-ins, add-ons, scripts and utilities to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book smarter, faster and better.

Today it gains a new section for Leopard Mail templates.

I’ve managed to round up 122 templates, including the 111 contained in Equinux’s shareware bundle. The others are all freeware and are themed for Christmas, sober business use, New Year’s and the birth of a baby girl (oddly missing from Apple’s default list).

If I have missed any, let me know.

Of course you can always “roll your own” which is more satisfying. Tutorials abound. See The Apple Blog , The Graphic Mac and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity .

I’ve also added Eaglefiler to the section on Archiving.

The plug-in list itself is sadly in need of revision.

Some plug-ins have disappeared, the development of some like the notification utility iNotify has been stopped so that they are not compatible with Leopard and others have moved around due to web site changes. And there are many more new utilities that I still haven’t added.

I’ll work through it slowly. Promise.

Related posts

• Plugin List update: 11 new entries
• Plugin and addon list updates
• Mail Scripts gets even more leopardy
• How Mail sucks (again), TUAW-style
• Hawk Wings Addon and Plugin List Update: 10 new entries