It is easy to use and quite clever.

First get the plugin from the developer’s Github site.

Copy the plugin file to your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns/ directory, and restart QSB.

Then to add a snippet, all you need to do is activate QSB and type quicks and select the QuickSnippet Regist option:

Enter the trigger and the snippet itself into the dialog box:

I’ve found that cutting and pasting blocks of texts into the snippet box preserves the line breaks when they are activated later.

When you’ve entered all the snippet you want, dumping them into an email message or other document is easy.

Just activate QSB, and type the snippet’s trigger. The snippet appears in the list below:

Select it and hit Enter. All done!

Obviously it’s not TextExpander, but for a lot of people it might be all the snippet management you need.

QuickSnippets is freeware and comes with more copious instructions in English and Japanese.

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I have my own barbaric views on this topic.

QuoteFix is a plugin for mail.app that answers every bottom-poster’s heart-felt cry.

When installed, it places the cursor below the original message, or below the selection if you highlighted some part of the message before hitting the reply button.

And it does it well:

It also claims to remove the signature from the original message and to remove unnecessary empty lines from the original message.

I have found performance more patchy on these two fronts, but the plugin is still in active beta development, so it’s unreasonable to expect too much.

If bottom posting is your thing and you use mail.app, you will want to test it for yourself.

Get the QuoteFix plugin and read the installation instructions on its Google Code page.

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His first script simply pipes a selected email from mail.app into your online Toodledo account, where it will wait for you to tag it, give it a context and a project or folder.

The second, more complicated script uses MailTags to tag and add other information to the task before you send it off.

When this script is run, it open up a copy of the email, ready to forward to Toodledo and offers you the chance to map fields from the message’s MailTags pane onto categories that Toodledo understands:

Keywords in Mailtags = Context in Toodledo
Project in Mailtags = Folder in Toodledo
Due-date in Mailtags = Due-date in Toodledo

Priorities:

Very Low (Mailtags) = “-1. Negative” (Toodledo)
Low (Mailtags) = “0. Low” (Toodledo)
Normal (Mailtags) = “1. Medium” (Toodledo)
High (Mailtags) = “2. High” (Toodledo)
Urgent (Mailtags) = “3. Top” (Toodledo)

Clever! You can tag and process the task without leaving Mail’s interface.

Of course, it’s even more clever to trigger the script with a keyboard shortcut, either in Quicksilver or Fastscripts or MailTags’ sister app, Mail Act-on:

You can get the scripts from Himanshu’s web site where they are freeware.

Combined with Toodledo’s own iPhone app or the Action Lists iPhone app , which is a dedicated GTD system using Toodledo as its backend, you can recreate a robust workflow for Getting Things Done that goes with you on the road.

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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:

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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!

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

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It’s easy to use.

First, get the script from veritrope.

Like all Apple Mail-related scripts, the best place to store it is in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder, so that it appears at the top of the AppleScript menu when mail.app is open.

Then find the email that you want to save into Evernote, highlight it and click the AppleScript menu on the right of your menubar:

The script grabs the email and shunts into Evernote. It loads the message first into Evernote’s Desktop app from which it syncs up automatically.

The script also presents a dialogue so that you can tag the email and select where to store it:

Chosing the “Select notebook from list” options retrieves a list of your existing notebook and also offers you the option to create a new notebook on the fly.

A nice Growl alert lets you know when it’s done.

The end result is a new Evernote note, nicely tagged-up and with a hyperlink back to the original message in mail.app:

Of course, it all goes much faster if you fire the script with a trigger in Quicksilver or set a keyboard shortcut for it with a utility like Daniel Jalkut’s excellent FastScripts .

veritrope also provides a fistful of applescripts for integrating Evernote with other popular apps like Yojimbo, NeetNewsWire, MacJournal, DEVONThink, even (of all things) Entourage.

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In a post on the Mailplane Google Group he explains:

Until recently, a Mailplane single user license was limited to two Macs. Because many users needed Mailplane on more Macs, I’ve decided to lift this limitation:

• Single-user license: *Install on all Macs you personally use.* Use it at home, school, work: just anywhere. *Limitation:* Make sure you’re the only user. Please do not share your license with anyone else.
• Family license: Allow up to five (5) family members *living in the same household* to use Mailplane on their Macs. As with the single user license, there is no machine limitation for any of the five users.
• Site license: For a number of users working at the same organization. Again, each user may use it anywhere.

As a result individuals will pay only USD 24.95 to use it on as many Macs as they own. The family licence costs USD 39.95. For a site licence covering 20 users or more, the price per licence drops to USD 17.95.

Mailplane is not just a slick way into Gmail’s web interface. It adds additional features like “drag and drop” attachments, the ability to integrate multiple Gmail accounts, enabling new mail notifications, sending screenshots and integration with the productivity app OmniFocus through a bespoke plugin.

If you are tempted to be unfaithful to mail.app and start an affair in the Cloud with Gmail (as I am from time to time), Mailplane is a very good investment.

It was good value for money before. Now, for people with more than two macs (like me), it is even better.

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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.

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miniMail 2.0 retains all the goodness of the original–the ability to minimize Mail.app’s interface like you can in iTunes–but adds more features and flexibility.

The minimised interface is elegant and efficient, as you would expect from the developer of MailTags:

It is also fully integrated with Mail Act-on, allowing you to use the same keystrokes to file messages away quickly.

The plugin’s Preference pane offers options to control which mailboxes it monitors, text size inside the minimized interface itself and how it should expand again when double-clicked (to the mail mail.app window or a single message window):

The Preference pane also controls miniMail 2.0’s new feature–multiple mini viewers.

You can now open a Message Viewer for a number of individual mailboxes and minimize them to keep track of new messages in particular accounts or even RSS feeds.

Here I am monitoring my work email in one miniMail window, my Hawk Wings email in another (one canny doctoral student sends his emails to both!) and the network status RSS feed of my ISP:

Very handy for keeping focus on important things whilst filtering out the rest.

miniMail is shareware (USD 12.95) and is available from Indev’s web site . Registered users of MailTags and Mail Act-on qualify for a USD 4 discount.

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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.

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