Hawk Wings » Apple Mail Tips

Hotmail, Yahoo and Lion’s mail

Tim Gaden — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:07:47 +0000

Mail.app users with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts have long had to use third-party plugins to get hold of their emails.

MacFreePOPs is one such utility that is already Lion-compatible and supports an astonishing range of web-based mail servers, offering POP-like access to your accounts.

Another plugin, mBox Mail , is just for Hotmail users and claims to offer a more “IMAP-like” experience.

It allows mail.app (or any other IMAP-enabled mail client like Thunderbird or Entourage/Outlook) to access Hotmail messages and folders, syncs trash between your mail client and the server and also syncs up drafts, sent mail and message flags.

A patch to make the app Lion-friendly has just been released.

Unlike MacFreePOPs which is donation-ware, an mBox Mail licence costs USD 19.99, although a 30 day free trial is available to try it out first.

I ought to confess that (contrary to my usual commitment) I haven’t tested this out first to see how well it works.Similar Posts:

Turning off Lion Mail’s animated windows

Tim Gaden — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:32:53 +0000

Lion’s mail.app animates its windows. When you open a new message or reply to an existing one, the window “zooms out” to greet you.

I can hardly see this on my 27″ iMac, but it is noticable on my MacBook.

If you dislike this kind of frippery, or would simply rather turn the animation off and get to your messages more quickly, a Terminal command can get you there.

Open up Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

If you change your mind it’s easy to go back again. Just open up the Terminal again, and type:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO

What could be easier?

Via: Cult of Mac (via: MacOSXDaily )Similar Posts:

Make your own Stationery for mail.app

Tim Gaden — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:42:09 +0000

James Dempsey has updated his tutorial on how to create your own fancy stationery in mail.app for Snow Leopard.

First posted in 2007, he has updated it to make sure that nothing got broken in the last two years.

He walks through the process of finding, opening and modifying an existing mail.app stationery bundle in eleven easy steps.

Sometimes it helps to have things described in more than one way, so check out the tutorials at The Apple Blog , and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity as well.

And don’t forget the “Related Links” below. The plugin does a good job. Sometimes they are actually related!Similar Posts:

10 new free Mail.app stationery templates

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:43:59 +0000

Jumsoft has released a new collection of ten free email stationery templates for mail.app.

Opinions are divided on whether HTML stationery is a good idea, but you will remember from the 2006 WWDC Keynote presentation that Steve Job is a fan. Like he said, “You can drop your own photos in here and move things around. Birthday announcements, dinners, you name it.”

The templates cover a range of possibilities — birthdays, the birth of a boy or girl, party invitations, and so on:

They all contain place-holders for your own photos and text. Creating your own masterpiece is just a few keystrokes away:

The templates are free and easy to install. You can get them from the Downloads section of Apple’s web site.Similar Posts:

Lowbrow Mail Stamp Icons: Simpsons Bonanza

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:01:55 +0000

Today nineteen newcomers join the existing list of Simpson replacement mail.app stamp icons.

The existing collection featured all the family, Ruprecht and (bizarre but not displeasing) Scully.

One new collection offers two of each family member, Itchy and Scratchy, Barny (IIRC), a family shot and more:

A nice spread, but only 256 x 256 px. You can find these files on deviantART , thanks to the efforts of guteCharlotte.

Another new collection offers five portraits of the Simpsons family in full 512 px glory:

You can find this collection on ~148′s deviantART page .

As I’ve mentioned before, replacing Mail’s stamp icon is easy.

These two new entries bring the Hawk Wings icon replacement list to 531 alternatives to the default stamp of a Red-tailed Hawk, although some of the earlier entries are probably dead by now and need pruning. apple mail, mail.app, icons, hacks, tips, mail stamps, simpsonsSimilar Posts:

Highbrow Mail Stamp Icons: Van Gogh, Klimt, Pollock

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:58:55 +0000

Klimt? Van Gogh? Jackson Pollock? O’Keeffe?

It’s not every day that you get a chance to dress up your Mail.app stamp icon with high art, but deviantART user fruit4dinner gives you the chance.

He (or she) has created four replacement mail stamp icons for mail.app featuring “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh, “Poppy” By Georgia O’Keeffe (a modern American artist — Wikipedia ) and “Convergence” by Jackson Pollock:

The icons are only presented as PNG image files on deviantART.

I have converted them into ICNS files, bundled them up and offer them to you here as a zip file. Enjoy!

Of course, if you are looking for something different and High Art doesn’t appeal, you can always look at today’s Simpsons Icon Bonzana-rama post or roll your own icon, following instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

Or snag one from Hawk Wing’s list of 509 (now 513!) replacement icons.

Luckily, Replacing Mail.app’s icon is easy. Apple Mail, apple mail tips, hacks, icons, mail.app, Photoshop, stamp icons, van gogh, klimt, okeeffe, pollockSimilar Posts:

Fixing Mail.app’s Undeleted Drafts Bug

Tim Gaden — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:32:38 +0000

Over at Rixstep , the blogger is in a fiesty mood. But in the midst of his claims about “a lot of buggy code in Mail.app” and how “Apple never respond with fixes”, he does raise a good point.

Snow Leopard, and Leopard before it, are not every good at deleting draft emails.

Its auto-save function leaves orphaned messages behind in its cache that are not registered in your Drafts folder (or on your IMAP server).

You can try this out for yourself.

First check your Drafts folder in Apple Mail and make sure that it looks empty.

Then open up your ~/Library/Mail folder, navigate to the Draft folder of your email account and open up the “Messages” folder. Although the folder shows iteslf empty in mail.app, in fact there are lots of auto-saved drafts in there!

Now if you are security conscious, or your work has particularly strict data management policies, then this is clearly a bad thing.

Otherwise, it’s just an annoying thing. They don’t do any harm but, still, Mail.app should be smarter than that.

Fortunately, the solution recommended by Rixstep–”you’ll have to go to the command line regularly to remove the orphans”–is not the only option.

There is a much easier way.

To remove the ghosts all you have to do is highlight the Drafts folder in Mail’s list of mailboxes on the left, and then select the Rebuild option from the Mailbox menu.

Poof! They’re gone.

Well, they are gone for the moment. You will need to do this again and again if the bug troubles you. And that’s the annoying part.

To make sure that is worked for you, you can check back in the Drafts folder of your Mail folder.

Mine looks good:

mail.app, apple mail, bugs, tips, imap, hopper, drafts, annoyancesSimilar Posts:

Using Snow Leopard’s built-in text snippets in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:12:29 +0000

Text snippet apps like TextExpander or TypeIt4Me or Typinator can boost your productivity enormously, saving time and wear-and-tear on fingers. After Mail Act-on , TextEpander is the most valuable tool I use in order to Get Things Done fast.

Not many people know that Snow Leopard now offers a system-wide “text substitution” feature that does the same job as those snippets managers.

It doesn’t work in all apps (like, sadly, TextMate in which Hawk Wings is written and its code tweaked), but it works in mail.app, although it is turned off by default.

To turn it on, you need to open a new Compose window in Mail. Then select the Substitutions option from the Edit menu:

The “Show Substitutions” option opens a dialogue with all the options:

“Smart Dashes” will automatically replace two hyphens with an em dash; Smart Links automatically hyperlinks email addresses and URLs; “Smart Quotes” makes your quotation marks curly.

The “Smart Copy/Paste” option in the Edit menu automatically decides whether a space needs to be added or not to anything you paste into a message.

Text Replacement is what we are interested in. Check it and then click the “Text Preferences” to open up the options in System Preferences:

Here you can select some pre-made snippets and insert your own. I’ve added some of my email addresses, and my work email signature.

There are two ways to get the line breaks that you need for longer snippets like email signatures. Either press Option-Return at the end a line, or type it first into TextEdit, and then cut and paste the text into the expansion field on the right.

From now on, every expansion you trigger when typing an email is saving you time.

Enjoy the feeling. Use the extra time to get your inbox to zero , then go and spend some time with your kids. Or failing that, drinking buddies.

UPDATE: In the comments, Phil provides a link to a macOSXHints tip that lists some Terminal commands to unlock text substitution in more Coca apps. (Sadly, not TextMate though.) Thanks! productivity, mail.app. apple mail, text snippets, snippets, textexpander, text substitution, text replacement, working to live not living to work

[This post was much improved by reading Rob Griffith's post on MacWorld ]Similar Posts:

10.6.2 broke my Mail plugin! :-(

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:24:15 +0000

Apple has changed the way that Mail.app interacts with plugins in Snow Leopard.

As Ken Aspelagh describes it on the Mac Observer:

“Each new version of Mail and the associated Message framework includes a unique code. Plug-ins have to explicitly declare themselves compatible with each new version,” Mr. Aspeslagh told The Mac Observer. “There is some sense to this as plug-ins are closely tied to the inner working of Mail, and stand the chance of breaking when Mail.app updates. Apple didn’t want to take this chance, so now they automatically disable all plug-ins with each update.”

So today’s 10.6.2 update is likely to break some plugins.

Most developers are only too aware of this issue, and will get updated plugins out fast.

Greg Welch, who develops the MailRecent and MailFollowUp plugins, has already got new, 10.6.2-compatible versions out the door.

Eric Hinterbichler has done the same with his new Herald Notification utility.

Other developers are sure to follow quickly. Some acted weeks before the update appeared, like Aaron Harnly who pushed out a compatible version of his Letterbox plugin three weeks ago.

10.6.2 broke the Mail clipping plugin from Omnifocus, but fortunately this can be restored simply by reinstalling it.

Other plugins, especially those not so actively or quickly supported, might be more difficult.

langui.sh has published some Terminal commands that will (potentially) revive other busted plugins. He has written them for GrowlMail but they could easily be adapted for other plugins, and “trick” them into working again.

It’s worth a shot, especially if you are in love with a plugin that’s not so well supported. However, maybe make a backup of the plugin’s bundle first. You know, just in case.apple mail, snow leopard, mail.app, plugins, UUID, AppleSimilar Posts:

How to email a file with Google Quick Search Box

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:56:28 +0000

Several readers have posted in the comments of an earlier post, asking how to email a file using Google’s Quick Search Box (QSB) utility.

It was much easier to know to do this in Quicksilver using a trigger.

In QSB it’s not as obvious, but it’s easy.

First you need to have QSB itself loaded and Martin Kühl’s Services plugin (see earlier Hawk Wings post).

Select the file that you want to email in Finder or on your Desktop or wherever.

Activate QSB. Type Command-G (⌘-G) to “get current selection”:

Type “email” into the dialog:

Hit the tab key to advance to the next screen:

Hit the Enter key to select “Perform Service” and — violà — a new email appears the file attached:

What could be simpler? QSB is not in Quicksilver’s league yet, but I have high hopes.quicksilver, google quick search box, QSB, apple mail, mail.app,tipsSimilar Posts: