In addition to the twelve improvements and fixes for Mail.app listed in 10.4.3‘s release notes, other new features make life better for Apple Mail (and Address Book and iCal) users:

1. Spotlight no longer seems to “hang” halfway through typing in your search term. This is a bonus for searches in Mail as well. There’s no need for third-party utilities to stop Spotlight jumping the gun.
2. Mail (and Safari) handle Hebrew and Arabic better. I guess this means smarter rendering of Right-to-Left text, but don’t know enough of either language to test it properly.
3. URLs are no longer lost when syncing your Address Book with .Mac. Good news. I’ve been stung by that before.
4. Address Book contacts organised by subgroup can now be transferred to an iPod using iTunes.
5. Improved syncing and subscription features for iCal.

Of course, the real fun now will be trying to find the undocumented improvements.

Scott Morrison released a significant upgrade to his MailTags plug-in for Apple Mail today.

The new version, 1.1, fixes compatibility issues with 10.4.3 and adds some great new features.

You can now tag emails by keyword, both in incoming and outgoing messages. This can be done in a number of ways including via the Contextual menu.

Searching by keyword, project or comment has been added to the “search slice”, as has a button that will enable the reading of messages in “Gmail conversation view”, sorted by email address or person:

Smart Mailboxes now contain a full set of MailTag options.

The update also fixes lots of bugs and annoyances, although some known issues remain — MailTags cannot store metadata on IMAP servers and there is a possible conflict with Mail Template.

If you use this plug-in, you will know how good it is. If you don’t, take this opportunity to check it out.

You can find more on MailTag’s goodness in an earlier Hawk Wings entry.

The new version and a full list of all the improvements are available from Scott’s web site.

Of course, it’s great to get an update to Apple Mail and find a lot of things fixed or improved.

But there’s a downside too. Joe Kissell suffers the most; he has to rewrite slabs of his upcoming Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger book.

The update also killed one of my tips. The list of improvements in Mail 2.0.5 suggests that,

Smart Groups of addresses can now be dragged from Address Book to a message?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s To, Cc, or Bcc field.

In fact, you don’t need to drag it. Just type the name of the Smart Group into the To, Cc or Bcc field of the Compose window and Mail.app finds it and inserts the addresses. That means this work-around for Address Book Smart Groups is no longer needed. Vale!

In a perverse way, I almost wish that 10.4.3 had killed more tips and work-arounds, like the ones for Broken long URLs in Apple Mail or launching Apple Mail in a hidden state. But it’s not nice to grumble on 10.4.3′s first day.

The Apple Discussion Boards and MacRumours Forums are both reporting that MailTags causes rules to be un-editable in Apple Mail under 10.4.3.

Removing the plug-in fixes the problem.

If MailTags is the problem, there is good news on the horizon for MailTag users. The beta version that I am testing seems immune to the problem and is working fine, allowing rules to be edited, deleted and removed.

The public release of the new version is not far away, I think.

UPDATE: In fact, just three hours after this post, MailTags 1.1 is here!

Apple has updated a tech note about disabled rules following the release of 10.4.3.

It now reads (in part):

If you’re using Mac OS X 10.4.3 and use .Mac to sync information, any Mail rules that you created before installing Mac OS X 10.4.3 will be disabled.

It then explains how to recreate any disabled rules by duplicating them.

It’s a bit confusing. My rules all look fine after the update. The title of the tech note says that the rules “may be disabled”; the content of the note now suggests that they “will be disabled”.

They can’t both be right.

UPDATE: Although my rules look fine, are active and work through my Mail Act-on shortcuts without any problem, some people report problems in the comments to this entry. (I think I’ve worked out why I’m not having problems and why they are, and it’s got nothing to do with .Mac synchronization).10.4.3, rules, sync, update, apple tech note, mail.app, apple mail

10.4.3 is out! You can download the Combo update (which might be a smart thing to do) from Apple’s web site.

It all went well for me. My Mail.app plug-ins and tweaks survived intact.

The release notes suggest a whole bunch of improvements and fixes for Apple Mail. Full details after the jump.

(more…)