Leopard Mail disables plugins when it is installed (as Tiger Mail did before it). That means all the productivity and eye-candy goodness that plugins provide is taken from you. Nasty! A poor bargain in return for Leopard Mail’s bling-bling HTML stationery.

However, not all hope is lost. Developers are scrambling to get Leopard-ready plugins into your hands.

And, in the meantime, you can try for yourself whether your favourites still work. Or not.

The Terminal commands that are needed to “re-enable” bundles and plugins in Leopard Mail are two

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1

defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

Close Mail. Type these into Terminal. Load up your bundles. Start Mail. Watch and see what happens.

Some work. Mail Act-on works after this Terminal trick. The current version will break the link to any Leopard Mail to-do created on the message, when the email is moved. But that’s a small price to pay. Scott Morrison is probably beavering away to fix this as I type.

MailAppetizer gives mixed results. It works, but no longer parses the HTML in the message properly:

So, it’s trial and error. I don’t have the patience to go through the whole list of plugins for Mail.app and report what’s working. But I’d be glad to hear from you in the commments if your favourites work. Or not.

Who dares wins!

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• Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates

Logan Rockmore’s notification utility Mail Unread Menu has been updated (again).

Now at version 2.0, it been repackaged as an application with an assisting mail bundle, which adds greater stability.

The font size and colour of the message count can now be set in the preferences and an option to Compose a new message has been added to the app’s drop-down menu.

Best of all, the drop-down menu now lists the new messages by individual mailboxes. Clicking on the one you want jumps you directly to that mailbox, saving time and mouse-clicks. Nice.

It’s safe to say that this is now the best of the menubar notification utilities.

Mail Unread Menu is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Logan’s web site .

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• Mail Unread Menu: Menubar notification
• OPENSTEP: The Prehistory of Mail.app plugins
• MailUnreadStatusBar notification app goes Universal
• MailFX: New Mail Notifier for Mail.app
• Mailboxer: Smart mailboxes for contacts

Once upon a time, Mail.app was the email application for an operating system known as NeXTSTEP. (For more on this, see the earlier Hawk Wings post, “Apple Mail: The Early Years“).

Then NeXTSTEP became OpenStep/OPENSTEP and Mail.app went with it. And OPENSTEP begat Rhapsody. And Rhadsody begat OS X. (Full genealogy on Wikipedia).

Steve Jobs, ever the polished salesman (image from Puckman )

Don Yacktman , then a OpenStep developer, wrote an article in 1997 which outlines how bundles or plugins worked in Mail.app and what they did.

He describes plugins like Cryptor (PGP encryption) and URLifier which placed a clickable icon in front of URLs:

Colorizer scanned headers for keywords and patterns and enabled you to modify the summary of messages (what we call the List View) according to the matches.

For example, you could place a big red arrow next to emails from your boss or colour the background of emails from your spouse pink.

Other plugins opened HTML email in the browser of your choice.

But the greatest of them all was EnhanceMail:

It collects a number of cool hacks into a single bundle. In displayed messages, it can turn smilies such as “:-)” into graphic smiley-faces. (There are over a dozen smiley graphics it uses to display the various types of smilies.) It has a wide variety of options for appending signatures (including “rich” signatures with graphics and various fonts) and options for quoting text from the original message. A user can even highlight a passage in a message, hit “Reply”, and only that passage will appear quoted in the response, making it easier to trim down quoted text. It also adds support for X-face graphics and adds an X-Image-Url: header which can be used to supply a better looking mail face picture. (It automatically looks up the images and displays them instead of the xfaces. And it caches them on your hard drive, too.) It adds several other highly useful features as well.

It’s amazing, he says, that in 1997 there were so many great plugins for Mail.app:

That’s a lot of modification for an application that doesn’t have a published API.

Despite this, he regards the design decision by NeXT which allowed Mail.app to load bundles on start-up as a crucial one in the app’s development:

A bundle developer can walk outside of the published API and make changes to applications that the application’s authors never even considered in their wildest dreams. In other words, by loading bundles, applications are throwing the door to future customizations wide open.

Amen to that!

Fulfill your wildest dreams on the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

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Oliver, another Ars Technica reader, has taken Mithras’ MailWideScreen bundle and tweaked it some more, following the advice of Malacoda.

He added alternating background colours for the rows in Message Viewer, vertical lines and small scrollbars.

He has posted screenshots of the result in the Ars Technica thread .

These tweaks are done by editing the nib files in Mail.app’s Resources Package with an app called Interface Builder, which is part of the Mac OS X Developer Tools.

These tools are not installed by default, but you can find them on your installation discs, where they live in a folder called “Xcode Tools”. After installation you will find them in a folder called “Developer” in the root directory (this may not be the right word, but a hangover from pre-Mac days) of your harddrive.

If you have them installed, you can navigate to the MessageViewerContents.nib file in your Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ folder of Mail.app’s package, click on it and it will open in Interface Builder.

At this point, I should confess that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing in Interface Builder, so if you want to read on and fool around with the way Mail looks (as I did), it’s at your own risk.

I recommend backing up Mail.app at the very least, or creating a duplicate of Mail.app and dragging it to the Desktop for safe keeping. Closing Mail first seems like a prudent step too.

It’s easy enough to create Oliver’s extra tweaks. When the nib file opens, click once on the Column view of the main window to select it:

Then bring up the Inspector, pictured above on the left, by pressing Shift-Command-I or Window > Show Inspector. All the options are there. Save your changes, quit and you’re done.

But once you start, it’s hard to stop. There’s lots more MailWideScreen-independent fun to be had. You can slim down the scrollbars whether you use the hack or not:

Or you can give the message viewer a once-over all your own. Here it is with alternating colours and horizontal lines:

I decided to stop before I busted something. But you don’t have to.

UPDATE: The MailWideScreen plugin has a new name: Letterbox

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Inside your Mail folder (~/Library/Mail) there are many files and folders. What are they all and what does Mail.app use them for? Find out after the jump.

(more…)

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• The final solution: Deleting Mail.app entirely
• Reclaiming disk space from Apple Mail
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