Ever felt that the red flag in Mail.app doesn’t offer you enough flexibility?

Flagit! is a plug-in that offers Mail.app users customisable flags of as many different colours as you like, as well as question and exclamation marks.

It is packaged as a plug-in for SIMBL , an Input Manager that allows application-specific hacks for Cocoa apps (like Mail.app).

It is not heavy on documentation. Pay close attention to the installer screen, because it offers you all the information you will get on how to use its new features:

Once installed, you can access its features through the “Mark” option in the contextual menu. Highlight the email you want to flag, Control-click (or right-click) on the email and choose the flag you want:

The Customize option opens a preference pane with room to edit the default flags and create as many new ones as you need:

It also provides the option to colourise the text of the email that you have flagged. Combined with the option to colourise the backgrounds of emails (which I do through Mail Act-on — Leopard users this way ), it can produce a riot of colour in your inbox.

If I wasn’t very happy about marking emails done or needing attention or waiting for a response with the keywords feature of MailTags , I could imagine using this, and benefitting from the additional visual help of coloured flags.

Flagit! works with Tiger and Leopard and is shareware (USD 8). You can download a 15-day free demo from the developer’s web site .

UPDATE: Users report in the comments that Flagit! doesn’t play nicely with the WideMail plugin. The comments also contain some tips on uninstalling Flagit!

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Someone, who seems to have some personal knowledge of Snow Leopard, claims to have solved the mystery of Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app.

In a post that details the various myths doing the rounds on the shrinking apps—no PPC code (false!), smaller binaries (false!), missing language files (false!)—the writer spills the beans:

When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file… Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.

I guess he is referring to these two files which are inside each (c. 84) folder within every (18) lproj localisation folder, as in this example from the English.lproj GeneralPreferences.nib folder:

Perhaps this is as false an explanation as all the others.

Still, it has enough specifics, specifics that only someone with access to a build of Snow Leopard could know, to lend the story credence.

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MacWorld seems to be heaving with articles of interest to Mail.app users today.

Kelly Turner kicks things off with a confession about her bulging inbox, its 35,000 emails and the level of self-deception involved in telling herself that her system was working:

…I often lost track of messages that still needed to be dealt with. As new messages arrived and older ones disappeared from my screen, I seldom thought to scroll down to see what was still unread. And although I’d developed elaborate coping mechanisms (using colors and flags and searches to identify messages) simply having an ocean of e-mail in front of me made the process of answering and checking e-mail seem like a Herculean task.

This forms a nice segue to the first part of Joe Kissel’s three-part “email renovation” series. He begins with a series of tips on reducing the amount of traffic that comes into your inbox in the first place—dealing with spam, all those hilarious joke-a-minute emails that your friends and family insist on circulating, learning what belongs in Mail.app and what belongs in iChat and more.

Part Two is on “Meet your new filing system”. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t mention Mail Act-on and MailTags , the two premier organisational plugins for Mail.app.

If you can’t wait for Joe’s next installment you can browse through past posts of mine (one, two, three) on getting things done with Mail Act-on and MailTags. Or read them now and see how much better Joe’s tips are when he posts them!

Joe also takes the chance to put up some links to articles he wrote in February 2007 on “clearing away the clutter” in your inbox. Anything by Joe is worth the time spent reading it. These are no exception.

Finally, Joe has written a piece on coming to grips with notes and to-dos in Leopard Mail. He offers some smart tips on moving your calenders and to-dos to an IMAP account. However, be sure to read the comments as well and see what problems people are having with getting iCal to behave.

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UPDATE: A post today claims to explain it all.

According to a post on AppleInsider , the apps in Snow Leopard are going to be dramatically smaller and more efficient.

This weight-loss regime is prompted by the need to slim Mac OS X down for the growing number of mobile devices, so RoughlyDrafted (the source of the AppleInsider report) suggests.

As the graphic below demonstrates, the new apps are significantly smaller; Mail.app alone loses 196MB, over 68% of its current size:

Who would have thought that Mail.app had so much weight to lose?

According to AppleInsider some of the efficiency comes from a greater centralisation of resources in Snow Leopard:

Among the technologies believed to be aiding the downsizing are Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics with smaller vector graphics files, and Localization, which extracts the plethora of localized language files from each individual application and instills them into a centralized container accessible to each application.

Mail.app users can also look forward to more complete text handling features like auto word correction, smart dash insertion and more.

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Hawk Wings reader Jesse Schooff emails to send in an updated Canada Mail stamp icon for Mail.app.

He writes:

After being teased one too many times about the “dated” 45-cent Canadian stamp, I’ve made an updated version. A bit of trivia: Canada Post’s current-run stamps have no defined value, so you can keep using them even if the price of postage goes up. Hopefully that will please the sticklers! It still bears the postmark from Markham, Ontario, Apple Canada’s HQ.

It’s a PNG file, which you can download from Hawk Wings. I had to run it through img2icns before it would do its thing.

I’ve added it to the Hawk Wings list of Alternative Mail Stamp Icons.

To round off this post, I’m trying to think of something witty to say about Mounties, beaver tails, lacrosse and the odd concentration of excellent Mac apps that come from Canada, but inspiration fails me.

If you are feeling patriotic, but not Canadian, check out this excellent collection of 30 national flag mail stamp icons on deviantART.

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Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (”I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found - and loves - MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

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