Scott Morrison has released a second public beta of MailTags for Leopard.

The updated beta features all the improvement of the six private beta versions that he has rolled out since the last public beta.

As a result, MailTags is now faster, more stable and reliable under Leopard. In particular, issues with Preferences, tagging, formatting links to individual emails (message URLs) and rules have been resolved.

MailTags also no longer causes Mail.app to open in the background.

However, it is not all just tidying up. Scott has added two new features to the second beta.

MailTags will now check the indev website for new versions at launch. If an updated version is found, the new release notes will be displayed with a button to open the download page in your browser:

In addition, the new beta adds a MT Debug menu to Mail’s menubar to help testers choose different debugging options. Once upon a time, these options could only be accessed with arcane Terminal commands. Not any more.

What’s next? Now that the foundation of the plugin are solid under Leopard, Scott intends to re-introduce the to-do and event features of MailTags. Soon my niggles with the way Leopard Mail does this itself will be a thing of the past!

Once again, Scott’s warning is worth heeding:

Our private beta testers have worked over the last few weeks to test many functions of MailTags. Our priorities are, as always, data safety (for your mail and your tags), reliability and stability. While we are confident that MailTags meets these requirements, we advise that some issues may have escaped our notice. We strongly recommend you maintain backups of your mail data or avoid using MailTags in critical situations.

You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments.

Related posts

• New MailTags Beta: Multiple to-dos and events
• MailTags 2.2 Public Beta 4: Polished flexibility
• MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 9: Better and better
• MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 7: Speed, stability
• MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 5: Attachment bug fixed

GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.

Related posts

• Fraser Speirs’ Growl AppleScript
• Ambient or layered notification in Mail.app
• Thunderbird, Growl and Getting Things Done
• Mail.app rule to extract an email to a text file
• Get selective GrowlMail-like notifications

Few things get the juices flowing faster than the top- vs. bottom-posting debate.

What seems natural to one user is an abomination to another; ideology does war with utility and efficiency; anathemas and personal abuse fly faster than they did at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) (Wikpedia ).

It can lead to guilt trips.

I’m pretty relaxed about it personally (although see an earlier attempt to develop a new metaphor in defence of top-posting).

John Gruber is not so relaxed. He calls top-posting “an uncouth and illiterate practice”.

And he has written a script that will over-ride Mail’s default top-posting behaviour.

Select an email in Mail’s message viewer, activate the script and Mail will produce a reply, quoting the text of the email and placing the cursor at the bottom ready for your couth and literate response.

Block a selection of text in the preview pane, and only that text appears in the reply.

It doesn’t work well with signatures generated by Mail itself, placing the cursor after the signature, although as John points out, Textexpander is a smarter, application-independent solution to signatures anyway.

While we are on the topic: You can play around a bit with the placement and format of the reply string in Mail.app:

Due to his new iPhone, John is currently cranking out applescripts for Mail. See also his quick and dirty “Inbox to Archive sweep” script .

Related posts

• YAI (Outlook meeting plugin) updated for Leopard
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Supercharging Mail’s workflow with Automator
• Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick

After watching a work colleague manually adding attachments to a Mail.app message, Martin Michel decided that there must be a better way.

And he made one. He has created Attaché, an AppleScript droplet that quickly creates an new email, with all the attachments dropped on it included and listed.

Just dump it on your Desktop (or wherever you like to keep droplets–in the Dock, perhaps). Select the files you want to send and drop them onto it.

Hey presto - an email with attachments and a list of what’s included:

If my life was full of industrial quantities of attachments, I can see how this would save a lot of time indeed.

It will also please people like Jonathan, who emailed recently with a particular attachments problem:

One thing that frustrates us is that when adding attachments the attachment name is always truncated for longer names. As we have to print a record copy of the email, and all our documents include a date at the end It is impossible to see the proper name of the email attachment. Is their a way to make it add attachment name in plain text, or not truncate?

Mail’s default behaviour is annoying. But the list that this droplet generates solves his problem. Nice!

Martin plans to add further features, zipping of the attachments, default recipients and subjects and more.

Of course, you can always drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock or use the proxy icon (as described in a recent Macworld tip ) which is good enough for me.

Attaché is freeware and available from his web site .

Related posts

• Attaché: Script for smarter attachments
• YAI (Outlook meeting plugin) updated for Leopard
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Supercharging Mail’s workflow with Automator

Steven Samuels has produced an applescript based on Jim Correia’s earlier script for piping emails from Mail.app into Yojimbo.

This script adds extra information about each email to Yojimbo’s Inspector pane, an idea, he says that he got “after seeing the “Summary” field in SOHO Notes.”

It adds the date on which the message was sent (yyyy/mm/dd) and the name or address of the sender or recipient to the Comments pane and also adds the first 60 characters (more or less) of the message:

The script, which contains substantial notes on its usage and limitations is available from the public archive of Yojimbo’s mailing list.

Related posts

• Script to send a Yojimbo item with Mail.app
• Script to pipe emails into Yojimbo
• Email to Yojimbo script with PDF support
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• Yojimbo 1.3: Tagging, hyperlinks and more

Scott Morrison has released a new public beta of his IMAP-savvy MailTags 2.0 plugin.

Public Beta 10 introduces the ability to turn off the automatic saving of tags to IMAP servers and to manage it manually. It also fixes numerous bugs, especially issues related to smart mailboxes and “to do”-related criteria.

Since tagging IMAP messages can create extra bandwidth usage, there is now an option in MailTags’ Preferences to switch off the autmoatic saving of tags to the IMAP server. This preference is on by default. Turning it off means that tags are only saved to the local cache files. You save bandwidth, but the tags are naturally not available to other computers.

For added fine-tuning, you can choose not to save tags on messages over a certain size:

When a message has tags that are only saved to the local cache, an extra button “Save To IMAP” appears at the bottom of the tags panel.

Clicking this button will immediately save the locally cached data to the IMAP server. A similar option appears in the MailTags menu and in Mail’s Contextual menu. Or you can just highlight the message and press ⌃⌘S.

Given Scott’s trademark attention to detail and completeness, a new criterion has been added for smart mailbox configuration: “IMAP Tags are/are not saved to server”.

A new icon in the MailTags column quickly indicates which messages have tags saved to the IMAP server or not. The messages with the orange tag icon have tags saved locally only:

Lastly, as extra insurance, tags not saved to the IMAP server are retained during mailbox rebuilds.

The latest public beta also contains a bucketful of bugfixes. The interface has been firmed up, HUD windows are better positioned, and customised MailTags columns behave better in the Mail Viewer.

Smart Mailboxes based on To Do items, especially on completed items, are smarter and will now work as expected, although you may need to reindex your tags using the new “Reindex Tags” option in the Preferences).

To dos now display using the user’s internationalization (or internationalisation) settings. Huzzah!

MailTags and iCal now mutually update deleted to dos and events more consistently.

Rules management has also been further improved. Two potential crashes when applying or editing rules have bene corrected, and rules are more efficiently applied.

Users with Dovecot IMAP servers will be glad to hear that MailTags no longer overwrites its X-Keywords headers when rebuilding mailboxes.

MailTags’ SpotLight importer has been updated to take account of new to do counts, completion status and IMAP save status.

This long list only picks the best bits out of a much longer changelog on the MailTags web site.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions.

Related posts

• New MailTags Beta: Multiple to-dos and events
• MailTags for Leopard: New Public Beta
• MailTags 2.2 Public Beta 4: Polished flexibility
• MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 9: Better and better
• MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 7: Speed, stability