“Season’s Greetings Vol. 2″ contains templates offering Christmas greetings, invitations, wishlists for your kids to send to Santa, templates for one of those much-loved “annual news-roundup” emails.

Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are not forgotten. Templates are included for those festivals too.

For those not in the know, Apple Mail’s stationery feature allows the app to send pre-made HTML emails, often quite fancy. Many of the equinux templates allow for customization by the insertion of your own photos and user-definable fonts:

The pack costs €7,95 (c. USD 11.80) and is available from equinux’s web site where you can also see the company’s other stationery packs.

If you are keen on this kind of thing, and know that your friends don’t mind receiving them, but you don’t want to shell out money for the option, you will find some freeware seasonal stationery templates listed in the following, previous Hawk Wings posts:

1. Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates.

2. More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free.

[via macnews.de ]stationery, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, addons, Christmas, hanukkah, Kwanzaa, festive season, more bandwidth-sucking tomfoolerySimilar Posts:

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To get started all you need to do is drop an image from your iPhoto library (or from anywhere for that matter) onto the app’s main window.

You can resize and reposition it, add a message in the pane to the right (adjust the font and text size to suit), and then add a stamp to the top of the postcard:

You can add a stamp from the library that comes with the app in the slide-out drawer on the right, or you can double-click on the stamp on the postcard.

You then get the chance to make your own stamp, using the built-in stamp editor:

Even the postmark can be customised.

When the postcard is finished, ⇧-⌘-A opens it up in a new Mail.app message, ready to go.

The developer also provides a zip file of handwriting fonts to add that extra touch of hand-crafted realism.

In an extra nice touch, the app can capture an image from an iSight camera. Since mine is built-in into the top of the screen, I can grab an image of wherever I am and send it.

In minutes you can knock up a postcard to a loved one or a swanky promo for your pet project:

Postcards is shareware (USD 10) and available from the developer’s web site . You can try before you buy, but the postcards are watermarked “unlicenced” until you pay.

[Thanks, Anthony!]mail.app, apple mail, postcards, ecards, photos, iPhoto, roll your own, plugins, addons, anti-productivity, iSight, George BushSimilar Posts:

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1. Address Book Dates (Age, star sign and iCal link for Address Book contacts) was added to the Address Book section.
2. LinkABoo (hyperlinks to Apple Mail messages in other apps) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
3. “Show Emails from…” (a quick way to list in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular contact) was added to the Address Book section.
4. MsgFiler (a “quick file” plugin for Mail.app) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. IMAP-IDLE plugin (provides support in Mail.app for IMAP’s IDLE command) was added to the Added Functionality section.
6. Google Calendar plugin for Address Book (auto-fill Google Calendar events with contact information from your Address Book) was added to http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#address.
7. Signature Profiler (enables enhanced signature functions in Mail, HTML and image insertion) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
8. Mailsmith to Mail.app export script (a smarter way to get your emails out of Mailsmith into Mail) was added to the Switching section.
9. Portable Mail.app (a version of Mail that will run from a removable drive, flash drive or iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. Mailing List Burster (an applescript that splits mailing list digests up into individual messages) was added to the Added Functionality section.
11. rooSwitch (separate profiles for settings in Mail, Safari and other iApps) was added to the Added Functionality section.

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Ten new entries were added, making a total of 130+ add-ons, plugins, scripts and helpful apps to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book quicker, smarter and more productive:

1. AddressX (Get Exchange contacts in Address Book) was added to the Address Book section.
2. Next Unread Message (Applescript to move to next unread message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
3. Export Address Book (easy merges of Address Book data with Word, FileMaker) was added to the Address Book section.
4. Note to Self (quick notes to yourself in Mail.app à la Leopard Mail) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. Email Backup (quick, one-step back up for mail.app, thunderbird and more) was added to the Archiving section.
6. OMiC (plugin wrapper for tnef.sourceforge.net to extract winmail.dat files) was added to the Added Functionality section.
7. Mail to Yojimbo (script to pipe emails from Mail.app to Yojimbo) was added to the Integration with other apps section.
8. Mail Unread Menu (discreet menubar notification for Mail.app) was added to the Notification section.
9. Return Receipts AppleScript (request return receipts from email clients that support them) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. MailPod (script to copy emails to any iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.

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To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:

Widgets

If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.

Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:

Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site .

Menubar utilities

High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).

It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .

Integration with Mail.app

I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .

If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .

Alarms

iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).

Backup

Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.

Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.

Of course, there are plenty more iCal utilities in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. ical, ical day, widgets, menubar, addons, alarms, backup, integration, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts:

• High Priority: Menubar iCal ToDo management
• MenuCalendarClock: More menubar iCal
• High Priority 1.1.1
• iCal-alarmist: Customised alarms in iCal
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps

This is a clever little plugin for Mail.app which prevents absent-minded people like me from sending emails without first including the attachments they should contain.

As he explains on his site , the universal version is enormous (7.3MB) because it includes a full universal version of Python.

In addition, the plugin now attempts to use the language set in the Spell Checker rather than the default System language. So, if your System language is set to English but your Spell Checker is set to Spanish, it will use the latter to determine if an attachment is present or not.

You can get the plugin (PPC, universal or source code) from his web site .attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, doh!, email, addonsSimilar Posts:

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Letterbox, which brings the three-paned Outlook or Entourage look to Mail.app’s interface, finds a place in the Added Functionality section.

iSay, an app that records spoken messages which are then packaged up as an attachment to a Mail message, has also been included in the Added Functionality section.

Today Tom Skawski II sent me a list of over 30 typos and stupid mistakes in the text of the Plugin and Addon List. Fixing them was a humbling and salutary experience, which should make the list (now 125+ entries) easier on the eye for readers. Thanks, Tom!plugins, addons, mail.app, apple mail, helpful apps, hacks, voice recording, voicemailSimilar Posts:

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The Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List has been updated.

CalTalk (sharing calendars over Bonjour) was added to the iCal section.

Address Book to CSV Exporter was added to the Address Book section.

Jumpcut (clipboard extender) and Gmail Counter (tracks disk usage in Gmail accounts) were added to the helpful apps / Miscellaneous Section.

Backend

More props to Brady Frey who performed some graceful surgery on the indexes of Hawk Wings’ MySQL tables last week. Thanks.

This is Hawk Wings’ 1,000th post. Huzzah!mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, plugins, addons, clipboard, gmail, hawkwings, vanity postSimilar Posts:

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Two new items were added to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. SBook5 (a smarter Address Book replacement) was added to the Address Book section and BackityMac (one-click backups) was added to the Archiving section.

The list now contains 127 plugins, addons, scripts, widgets and helpful apps that make work with Mail.app (and iCal and Address Book) easier, quicker, more efficient and more enjoyable.

Link Round-up

Inspired by Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series , I’ve decided every week to reduce my list of things to post about to zero too.

Here are the note-worthy things of the week that could have become posts in their own right, but didn’t:

• The Official .Mac Blog carries some tips on how to use .Mac aliases on your iWeb sites.
• DayLite 3.0, a powerful contact and project management app, has been released, along with an updated DayLite Mail Integration module
• O’Reilly’s Sys Admin blog has discovered a quirk in the way Mail.app handles traffic through a SSH tunnel.
• According to Downloadsquad , Thunderbird isn’t for everyone.
• AusAB, a set of Address Book plugins for Australian has been updated to accommodate changes on the Whereis web site.

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I can’t bring myself to pimp links like that for FreeMacWare (or anyone else), but the idea itself is a good one.

So, here are the five best freeware extras for Mail.app:

1. Mail Scripts . The collection of scripts from Andreas Amann is top-notch. They offer the ability to add all the email addresses in selected emails to your Address Book, to archive messages, to change SMTP servers on the fly, to remove duplicate messages, schedule email delivery and much more.
2. Mail.appetizer. Handsome, in-your-face, instant and informative notification of arriving emails. Lovely.
3. Event Maker. The best freeware solution for integrating Mail and iCal. Give it a Quicksilver trigger or FastScript hotkey, and iCal events, to dos and all-day events are just a key stroke away.
4. FastScripts Lite. This limited version of FastScripts by Daniel Jalkut offers up to ten hotkeys for AppleScripts and other excellent options to make using scripts in Mail and elsewhere more efficient. Nice.
5. MailUnreadStatusBar. If you are into the kinds of productivity tips that Merlin Mann is talking about in his Inbox Zero series at the moment, you will love this little app.

   It is much more discreet than Mail.appetizer, listing and offering mailbox-specific access to new mail without flashing it up in your face and thus interrupting your attempts not to live in your Inbox.

Of course, the best things in life are not always free. For a list of the very best things for Mail.app — freeware, donation-ware or shareware — see the Top ten things every Mail.app user should have.freeware, mail.app, apple mail, top five, addons, plugins, scripts, applescript Similar Posts:

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