Email backup is a simple, easy-to-use app that offers dedicated email backup for Apple Mail and Entourage v.X and 2004.

It backs up all the files needed to restore your email in the event of a corruption or some other disaster.

The single-paned interface allows you to specify the backup destination and options to schedule the day and time:

A revised version released today adds an option to turn verbose logging on and off, fixes a rare freezing issue that occurred on some systems and adds a progress indicator for manual backups.

Of course, there are many options for creating a regular backup regime. Hawk Wings has posted about many of them—BackityMac, Synk, applescripts, Dejà vu, although there are others.

UPDATE: As Steve points out in the comments, this app only backs up your preferences file and the essential files and folders in your ~/Library/Mail folder. If you want to back up any saved or modified attachments or your Address Book (which I think is part of any sensible Mail backup) you will need to find another method to include all the files needed for a full backup (listed in an earlier Hawk Wings post).

Email Backup is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .backup, apple mail, mail.app, entourage, files, schedule, better safe than sorry

Yesterday Apple Australia kindly flew me up to Sydney for a look around its corporate headquarters and for a very interesting two-hour press presentation from Mr iPod and Mr Hardware. (Mr Software is at WWDC, so I didn’t hear from him.)

In the course of the day, I discovered four new things about Apple that I didn’t know before.

1. The black MacBook is intended to be a 12″ PowerBook replacement

I had the chance to ask Mr Hardware as he was presenting the now complete range of Intel Macs whether anything was coming to replace the 12″ PowerBook.

He told me that Apple has received a lot of feedback from users about the need for a small notebook with a “more professional look”. Apple made a conscious decision to meet that demand with the black MacBook, giving those users the look they wanted at the cost of a slight hit in performance and features. Is that why they cost more?

2. Only 26% of Mac users do backups, 4% use automated solutions.

Of course, you know at one level that the numbers are low, but it is still a shock to see just how low they are.

Those who have watched the keynote will know that Leopard’s Time Machine is designed to increase these numbers dramatically.

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

Dear reader, for the love of God get yourself into that 4%. Don’t read the other two things I didn’t know about Apple. Go now and check out Dejà Vu or BackityMac or SuperDuper! or, if you have a .Mac account, Apple’s own Backup.

3. iTunes prints really nice CD covers.

I use iTunes a lot, but it never occurred to me to visit its Print menu. Mr iPod demonstrated how easy it is to make jewel case covers in iTunes and how nice the final result looks:

4. Steve Jobs doesn’t trust people who use words as a tool of their trade

At the airport I picked up a copy of Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005) (Amazon ) to read on the plane.

On the homeward flight I discovered an answer to the mystery about the lack of communication between engineers and development teams at Apple and journalists, bloggers and third-party developers (after all, code is words).

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and became Interim CEO in 1997, he

…quickly saw things that he didn’t like. His predecessors in the CEO’s office has never figured out how to take the reins in a commanding manner…. He set about changing the culture of Apple. Some of the changes were small (no dogs at work, no smoking), and some where whoppers, such as the absolute ban on talking to anyone outside the company who uses words as a tool of his trade. (The one exception: it was okay as long as you has a public relations dog-watcher sitting at your side and yanking your leash whenever she wanted you to stop talking.)

apple, steve jobs, itunes, not apple mail, macbook, words, culture change, backup, thanks Fiona, iPod

Today is ‘iCal Day”, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon.

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 mail

The latest version of the email archiving and searching app, MailSteward, offers support for MailTags .

That means it will recognize and import your metadata along with your messages and allow you to search with it by category, keywords, notes and/or priority. You can also add new tags to the archived messages. Nifty!

The new version also offers searching of HTML emails with no plain text, editing of MailSteward-generated SQL statements and other minor bug fixes and enhancements.

The interface has also been reworked and looks cleaner.

All of this archiving goodness comes with a price hike though. MailSteward now costs 49.95. A demo is available from the developer’s web site .mailtags, email, archiving, backup, searching, plugins, html, metadata

Mail Archiver is an app that archives and cleans the mailboxes of Mail.app (and PowerMail, Eudora, Mozilla, Thunderbird and Entourage).

Version 1.5b4 features a new icon and interface. The new interface has been simplified and beautified and the odd floating window of previous versions is gone.

It offers full support for Mail 2.0 and Filemaker 8. The attachments are now saved to the archive and the app boasts better MIME handling overall.

Mail Archiver X’s main competitors in the archiving stakes are MailSteward and FastMailBase.

In contrast to these, Mail Archiver X promotes itself as “the only mail archival application, which also offers cleaning of mails”. This means the ability to strip HTML, control tags and various other characters out of your emails, so that only clean copies of the useful material are retained:

Mail Archiver X is shareware (USD 34.95), fifteen dollars cheaper than Mail Steward (USD 49.95). FastMailBase is about twice the cost of Mail Steward (USD 97).

Which one is the best? MailSteward offers more sophisticated searching. Mail Archiver X offers cleaning. It depends on you and what you want from an archiving app.

Mail Archiver X is available from the developer’s web site .archiving, backup, mail.app, apple mail, cleaning, html, plugins

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List now contains 133 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.

The following six have been added since the last update:

• Mailfollowup (more natural replies to group conversations) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• JABMenu (Address Book Menubar utility) and EntourageABMenu (useful Exchange server address support for Mail.app users) were added to the Address Book section.
• PocketLight (Spotlight-like searching for Panther (10.3) Mail, iCal and Address Book users) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• Missing Attachments (a plugin that checks for missing attachments in a Mail.app message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
• An AppleScript to backup iCal and Address Book data was added to the iCal section.

mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, plugins, applescript, utilities, menubar, contacts, backup, attachments

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.

He is also offering to answer any queries people might have with using it.

It’s not as user-friendly as BackityMac, but it’s a solution that will put you in touch with your inner Geek.ical, address book, backup, applescript