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.

Somewhere, in recent updates to Safari 5.0 (included in the 10.6.4 update), something went wrong with the way applications pass text to each other.

A post at MacFixIt suggests that the fault lies with WebKit, which is now “using rgb(0,0,0) as the value for the CSS “background-color” property for messages”.

Whatever the cause, emails generated in other apps often arrive in Mail.app with black text on a black background.

Here are some I made earlier: one generated by mailing a to-do from iCal:

Another created by running an applescript over a blog post in Safari:

Suggested workarounds vary in complexity. Some involve dragging iCal appointments to the Desktop and then into Mail, others suggest copying all the blacked-out text, cutting and pasting it into another app like Textedit to turn it into plain text and then pasting it back again.

Unmarked Software, the developer of TextSoap, has even produced a stand-alone Mac OS X Service, FixMailText , as a work around.

In fact, the fix is quite simple. Apple’s technote on the problem points out that all you need to do in most cases is

1. Place the cursor into the body of the email.

2. Press ⇧+⌘+T (Shift + Command + T) to turn it into plain text. Or select “Make Plain Text” from Mail’s Format menu

3. Carry on.

It also suggests a slightly more convoluted workaround for those who need to preserve links embedded in Rich Text:

If you want to preserve links the message might contain:

1. Click in the body of the Mail message
2. Press Command-A to select all
3. Press Command-X to cut
4. Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
5. Press Option-Shift-Command-V (Paste and Match Style)

This will replace the black-on-black text with text that uses your default Mail font settings.

As others have said, a technote from Apple on the problem is as close as one will get to acknowledgement that something is wrong.

Hopefully a proper fix is not far away.

UPDATE: 6 July 2010 Mail Attachment Iconizer, a mail plugin that is also afflicted with this bug has been updated with a release (2.1.10) that resolves the problem. [ via MacFixIt }apple mail, safari, webkit, mail.app, apple mail bugs, ical, applescript

Today nineteen newcomers join the existing list of Simpson replacement mail.app stamp icons.

The existing collection featured all the family, Ruprecht and (bizarre but not displeasing) Scully.

One new collection offers two of each family member, Itchy and Scratchy, Barny (IIRC), a family shot and more:

A nice spread, but only 256 x 256 px. You can find these files on deviantART , thanks to the efforts of guteCharlotte.

Another new collection offers five portraits of the Simpsons family in full 512 px glory:

You can find this collection on ~148′s deviantART page .

As I’ve mentioned before, replacing Mail’s stamp icon is easy.

These two new entries bring the Hawk Wings icon replacement list to 531 alternatives to the default stamp of a Red-tailed Hawk, although some of the earlier entries are probably dead by now and need pruning. apple mail, mail.app, icons, hacks, tips, mail stamps, simpsons

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, pollock

Most mail.app users will have noticed that OS updates can break their plugins and third-party bundles.

This happens because Apple now changes the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) of Mail with every update, and requires plugins to match the new UUID each time in order to function. Thankfully, most developers are on the ball and provide updated versions of their plugins in good time.

GrowlMail, a notification plugin for mail.app that uses the Growl framework, fell prey to this problem after the 10.6.4 update.

If yours is broken, you can download a patched version of the plugin from the developer’s web site.

He also provides new plugin compatibility UUIDs that may bring other disabled bundles back to life.

Further help for other disabled plugins (like DockStar) is available in a macOSXHints tip .

UPDATE: 5 July 2010 A new version (1.2.2) of GrowlMail has been released, which is compatible with 10.6.4.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, growlmail, growl, notification

Apple Mail’s popularity is on the rise. Its market share increased by 21% in 2009, from 7.64% to 9.69%, according to the latest survey by email marketing company CampaignMonitor.

Over the same period, the iPhone and iPod touch captured 8.69% of the market.

One caveat: the results of the survey are based on email image displays. As the company notes, this can skew results in favour of clients that display images by default (like Outlook 2000 and the iPhone) and penalise clients that block images by default (like Outlook 2007 and Gmail).

Nonetheless, the survey’s findings are striking.

The Outlook juggernaut continues to lead the pack, although its share fell by 2.78% in 2009.

Gmail, so central to the email experience of techno-pundits, only accounts for 5.74% of the market overall.

1.31% of users still crank up Lotus Notes to read their emails. Who knew?

CampaignMonitor helpfully summarises the main winners and losers:

But how many people open how much of their email how often on their smart phones rather than on a laptop or desktop? Apart from the iPhone’s glowing performance, the survey doesn’t say.

The survey presents a snapshot of the market in January 2010, and is based on a sample size of more than half-a-billion image displays. mail.app, apple mail, email, gmail, iphone, apple, microsoft outlook, lotus notes

Hawk Wings reader Nic Plum has written an AppleScript that helps MailTags and Evernote play nicely together.

The script sends a selected email to your Evernote Inbox as a note, importing any MailTags keywords as Evernote tags in the process.

As a result he works with one set of tags across Mail.app and Evernote, and doesn’t have to double-handle nearly as much.

He has made the script available on sourceforge, and welcomes comments and feedback.

The download includes a comprehensive guide on how to install and use the script.

Mail.app users who don’t use MailTags can still import emails into Evernote and get a productivity boost by tagging them with an AppleScript described in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

mail.app, applescript, evernote, productivity, apple mail, mailtags