GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.mail.app, apple mail, growl, notification, tips, applescript, rules

Many SBC Global/Yahoo users like René are having trouble collecting their POP mail.

They receive this message:

The POP server “pop.swbell.yahoo.com” rejected the password for user “myaccount@swbell.net”

or the polling attempt just times out.

MaxFixIt has collected a number of user experiences. It also offers four work-arounds while SBC Global/Yahoo tries to fix the problem:

1. Set Mail.app to poll for messages every 30 minutes instead of every five or one.
2. Delete existing keychain entries for SBC Global/Yahoo
3. Click “Cancel” on the error dialog and allow Apple Mail to try again by itself later.
4. Use your full email address as your user name.

(SBC Global/Yahoo is a large ISP in the USA. Customers at the following franchises/affiliates are affected: SBC Global Ameritech, SBC Global Flash, SBC Global NVBell, SBC Global Pacbell, SBC Global Prodigy, SBC Global SNet, SBC Global SWBell, SBC Global Wans and SBC Global Yahoo!)

A week ago, MacFixit reported a keyboard shortcut bug in Apple Mail (“Sudden death: Control-T in the Compose window“). Now there’s a work-around.

It involves changing the default keybinding for “Control-T” by editing the DefaultKeyBindings.dict file in your ~/Library/KeyBindings/ folder. You can read all about it on MacFixit.

Apple Mail only allows you to control the sound it makes when new mail arrives. There is no easy way to modify the other noises that the app makes.

Some people find that annoying. If you are one of them, or you just like to fiddle, you can find instructions on how to replace the default sounds with sounds that you like in a post on macOSXHints. Originally written with Panther Mail in mind, it will work in Tiger too.

One poster boldy claimed that the only noises a Mac should make are the ones that come out of iTunes. He went all the way, stripping every sound file out of the Mail 2.0 package without any ill effects.

UPDATE: Jeremy takes some of the wind out of this entry’s sails in the comments. He points out that you can simply uncheck the “Play sounds for other mail actions” option in the General tab of Mail’s Preferences. Quite so.

But then you wouldn’t hear your favourite Simpsons/Star Wars/South Park/Lord of the Rings sound clip replacements (urgh!) for the Mail Sent.aiff and Mail Fetch Error.aiff files.

Apple Mail doesn’t offer an easy way to customize the reply string in your emails. But with a little bit of courage and some careful editing, it is possible to modify the way that Apple Mail introduces quoted material in replies.

Look carefully at the following three screenshots:

The format of each reply is only slightly different, but for people who care about these things, having the wrong format is intensely annoying.

Still interested? Some hints on how to edit the string follow the jump.

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As everyone knows, Apple Mail cannot compose HTML emails. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send them. It just means that the process is a little involved. Here are three ways to do it in OS X 10.4 Tiger.

1. Via Safari

1. Compose a message in Dreamweaver, GoLive or the HTML editor of your choice.
2. Save it to your Desktop.
3. Open it in Safari
4. Select “Mail Contents of this Page” from the File menu in Safari (or press “Command+I”).
5. Mail 2.0 will open a new message with the HTML displayed inside it.

It’s a bit of a hassle. I wouldn’t do this everyday. But I did do it once a month for a work-related email newsletter.

2. In TextEdit

Hendy suggests another way (posted in the comments):

Or, just make a Rich Text document in TextEdit, complete with links, fonts, colours, etc. Then copy and paste into a rich text Mail message and send. If you check the source, Mail will send the message in both plain text and html formats.

But I wouldn’t want to try anything too complicated that way.

3. With the MailPictures plug-in

Die-hard hand-coders can enter raw HTML into emails – or cheat a bit by importing raw HTML from another editor – using the MailPictures plug-in. Checking the “Show options in compose window” in the Advanced section of the Mail Pictures Preference Pane enables this.

OS X 10.3 Panther users might get some joy from an AppleScript written by Andreas Amann and originally posted in the Mail Reader Reports on MacInTouch (about seven eighths of the way down the page), but zipped up and available here. Andreas provides instructions for its use in the MacInTouch post.

Klaus emails to ask:

does anyone know how to put the mailboxes on the right side?
?¢‚Ǩ¬®In Panther you could have them on either side, but now it seems they have to only be on the left and it bugs me?¢‚Ǩ¬¶..
can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t find a way to switch them?¢‚Ǩ¬¶..
any ideas?

I’ve scoured the internet pretty carefully and can’t find anyone who has posted a way to do this in Mail 2.0. Does anyone know,

1. If this can be done, and
2. How to do it?