Hawk Wings » apple mail tips

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:

iDeskCal: Easy calendars on your Desktop

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:21:03 +0000

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember the iCalViewer app that places a streaming calendar on your Desktop.

I discover that it’s still going strong .

For USD 11 it will stream calendars and upcoming to-dos as nicely under Snow Leopard as it did under Tiger:

It forces you to stay aware of what’s coming up, and spares the trouble of diving into iCal all the time.

iDeskCal is another utility that does something similar. It puts your selected calendars on the Desktop, but the output is more like something GeekTool would produce. Here is an example, with the to-dos hidden:

Like iCalViewer, the app lives in the menubar. Preferences include a General pane in which you can control how it operates and set hotkeys for adding events and to-dos, and hiding and displaying to-dos or the app itself:

A second pane allows you to select which calendars will be displayed:

A Display pane controls the look of the calendar on the Desktop, including its size, position, opacity and colour options:

iDeskCal is slightly more expensive (USD 12.99) than iCalViewer, and is available from the Hash Bang Industries web site. It offers a fully-functional 14-day trial.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:

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:

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:

Secrets Updated for Snow Leopard

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:43:55 +0000

Secrets, a clever little System Preference Pane that makes tweaking “hidden” features of Mac OS X easy (see earlier Hawk Wings post for more), has been updated to 1.0.6 and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.

Secrets provides easy assess to many of Mac Os X’s settings that you can otherwise only change by messing around in Terminal with long command strings, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It includes tweaks for many Mac core and a wide range of third-party apps. The most popular tweaks across all the apps are listed separately as well.

Of course, here we are most interested in its options for Mail.app:

Secrets Mail Preferences

As you can see from the screenshot, Secrets allows you to

specify a default BCC email address
force Mail to display messages in plain text
set the Bundle compatibility and enable bundles
enable and disable the data detectors
switch the new (annoying) Snow Leopard behaviour of including names in copied email addresses on and off
set a sent mail sound
specify a minimum for HTML messages and a preferred text encoding
request read receipts
set the interval for refreshing Mail’s RSS feeds
Decide whether to display attachments inline or not.

And more.

Some people will think of it as a hack and might be wary. However it comes with the reassurance that Alcor, the developer also (once) behind Quicksilver, is its creator. That’s a strong pedigree.

Secrets is freeware and available from the Blacktree web site .

UPDATE: I read on TUAW that the Blacktree site is overloaded. Secrets is also available from the app’s page on code.google.com. secrets, preferences, hidden preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, tweaks, tips, bundlesSimilar Posts:

Quickly add URLs to Apple Mail Signatures

Tim Gaden — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:24:14 +0000

As everyone knows, it has long been possible to add a very fancy signature to your mail.app emails, using the excellent tutorial provided by Melvin Rivera.

It’s complicated, involving some digging around under the hood. It also requires a measure of HTML and CSS coding ability.

However, when the process is over the result is impressive (provided that you don’t hold a faith position on plain text in Internet communication):

Now a poster on macOSXHints has discovered an easier way. It is possible to add hyperlinks to your signatures in Mail’s Preferences without the pain involved in the first option.

All you need to do is type text into the signature field, highlight it and press Command-K (⌘-K). Up pops a dialog into which you place the URL, and you’re done. In a minute you have a hyperlinked signature, not as polished as Melvin’s, but easier on the eye than a sig full of long URLs:

Rob Griffiths comments that the tip didn’t work for him in 10.5, but it’s working fine for me in 10.6.1 (mail.app 4.1).

Of course, Command-K (⌘-K) also works in the body of any (rich text) email you are composing.

[Via macOSXHints ]Similar Posts:

Change Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon Back Again

Tim Gaden — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:12:22 +0000

Eventually, having changed Snow Leopard Mail’s icon to something you like, you might want to change it back to the default image—perhaps you’re tired of the new one, perhaps you need a vanilla Desktop for freelance work, or whatever.

It’s not too hard.

Find mail.app in the Applications folder, highlight it and open up its Inspector pane (⌘-I).

Then follow the first two steps in the first post to unlock and change the permissions. Then all you need to do is highlight the image in the top lefthand corner, and press the Delete key. The image reverts to the previous one.

Remember again to change the permissions back at the end.

Now it’s as if you never made the change:

[John in the comments points out how an earlier version of this post used a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Thanks!]
Apple Mail, mail.app, icons, stamp, hack, tweak, customize, tipsSimilar Posts: