George Starcher has the same problem as I do, and he has the answer. He explains how to create an Automator action that will pull out the events for the upcoming week from individual iCal calendars and email them to your significant other and/or negligent fellow worker.

Moving carefully through his steps in Automator and setting the resulting plug-in to run in iCal takes about five minutes.

Some of this steps are, in fact, unnecessary. You don’t need to create a calendar for the plug-in in iCal first, saving it as an iCal plug-in will create an Automator calendar for you.

The end result is a nice email full of what’s coming up:

Of course, success depends on the theory that the significant other is more likely to read an email than look at a calendar. YMMV. automator, ical, collaboration, sharing, calenders, events, mail.app, apple mail, productivitySimilar Posts:

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The update was announced on the same day as Steve’s MWSF keynote, so it seems to have sunk without a trace. That’s a shame, as Zimbra is not only the closet thing that I have ever used to a Microsoft Exchange killer, but also works seamlessly with mail.app. It even plays nicely with MailTags.

I use it at work and it is rock solid. With its iCal-syncing Preference Pane, it also provides the platform-independent email and calendaring interface between me and my PC-using PA.

According to the press release , the Zimbra Team are cock-a-hoop about Leopard. CEO and co-founder of Zimbra, Satish Dharmaraj, says that, “The amazing speed of Safari 3 has blown the Zimbra team away and we are excited to be the first major collaboration platform to support the calendaring standard CalDAV.”

I will admit that I began to drool (a little) at the mention of the iPhone interface:

Additionally, ZCS is now available to iPhone users via the Zimbra Mobile HTML client. The iPhone’s Safari browser enables fast access to the full-featured AJAX interface, and the Zimbra Connector for Apple iSync allows users to sync not only their email but also their address books and calendars to their iPhones.

Unfortunately, the IT Department where I work is currently enjoying some personnel restructuring and doesn’t have the resources to commit to upgrading our installation to the new version anytime soon. Perhaps you will have more luck.

Although it is now owned by Yahoo!, Zimbra retains its open-source roots. An Open Source Edition is available for free. Other, more expensive options including product support are also available. All of them can be explored at the Zimbra web site .

The company is also hiring .zimbra, mail.app, apple mail, leopard, caldav, iphone, safari, opensource, collaboration, microsoft exchange, productivitySimilar Posts:

• Zimbra’s Mobile Phone interface on an iPhone
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• Msgpush.com: Better push email for the iPhone?
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In some ways it offers better productivity features than Leopard Mail and it’s here now.

IMAP tag support

Probably the most anticipated new feature is full support for tagging emails in IMAP accounts.

This is achieved by storing the keywords, projects and other metadata in encoded X-MailTags headers in the email itself. When new MailTags information is added, MailTags writes a new copy of the message to the server. The metadata is stored server-side, making it available on any Mac you use which has MailTags 2.0 installed. Synchronised tagging has arrived whether you are in the office, at home or on the road.

You can also choose to save the metadata in clear text so that other email clients like Thunderbird will be able to read it.

The MailTags Pane

Many of the new features in this beta are best understood from the new-look MailTags pane.

Individual sections of the pane can be hidden or shown as you prefer by clicking on the disclosure triangle in the top left of its header.

Interaction with iCal continues to improve. Support for to-dos allows you to set priorities, due dates and to add comments in the Notes field. You can set a default calendar for MailTags to use in the MailTags Preferences.

The linkage between Mail.app and iCal has been improved through the use of a new URL format (message://mymessage-id @ server.com) which will find the relevant email regardless of the actual file location.

The Notes field now automatically expands with the size of the window, so that verbose people like me can see all the info for a particular email more easily.

In another much-hoped improvement, the Notes field can be used to replace the subject line of the email (see the subject line in italics in the screenshot below). Neat!

In the Compose window MailTags pane, additional options allow you to tag your outgoing message and/or tag the original message with the same tags as the reply. You can also create a rule to accept reject tags based on any criteria (such as member ship in a specific address book group).

This is a real bonus for work groups. Tagging outgoing messages gives people working on shared projects the ability to accept and share tags with other collaborators.

Of course, you may run into a nutcase using MailTags 2.0, so the option to refuse attached tags is also included.

Seeing your tags in the ListView

One of my favourite new features is the ability to see your projects and tags in the Message ListView, which provides additional and immediate visual cues about what you need to get done.

Command-clicking on any column header to add or remove the project, keyword, priority and due date columns.

When matched to the project-related colour coding of messages, you know at once what needs to be done in what sphere of your life:

The expanded Preferences now contain a number of separate panes to manage the plugin’s options. These options and MailTags 2.0′s other new features are set out in an expanded and comprehensive readme file.

How does it compare with Leopard Mail, or at least, with as much of Leopard Mail as we have seen? As Scott says,

While Mail 3.0 brings some MailTags-like features to Mail, MailTags continues to add many features not included with Mail 3.0, including keywords, project and priority tagging, saving notes directly with message, changing subject lines, dynamic coloring of messages, full integration with rules and smart mailboxes, and more.

Upgrade Warning!!

Installing MailTags 2.0 will erase the settings for MailTags 1.2.2. This is set out at the top of the plugin’s new readme file, but is worth repeating. However, MailTags 2.0 saves a backup of your info so that can go back to MailTags 1.2.2 if you decide that the beauty and power of MailTags 2.0 is not for you.

Registration and Special Offer

MailTags 2.0 is not donation-ware. It is shareware (USD 29.95). After a trial 30 day period, unregistered users will be unable to tag messages.

During the beta test period, you can purchase MailTags 2.0 for a reduced price of USD 25 by following the links in MailTags preferences.

MailTags has more than quadrupled the productivity grunt of Mail.app for me. It is money very well spent.

You can get the public beta from Scott’s site where you will also find a support forum for all your MailTags queries.

Of course, MailTags 1.2.2 will continue to be available too under the same donation-ware conditions as before. MailTags 1.2.2 users can look forward to an update with minor bug fixes later this week.mailtags, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, tagging, to-dos, ical, workgroups, collaboration, IMAPSimilar Posts:

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Late last year Business Week published an article on how email is in its death-throes and Stowe Boyd later confirmed that it is all true — email is on its last legs.

Tebbutt has a more nuanced view. He sees the value of wikis, IM and other collaborative tools as ways of freeing us from the avalanche of “Reply All” emails that whizz around the average office, described by Ross Mayfield of Socialtext as “occupational spam”.

He argues that greater use of these tools doesn’t mean the end of email. On the contrary, he says, it will free email up:

In fact, email could well be heading for a renaissance as a person-to-person communication tool. Exactly what it was invented for.

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It’s so good that I think I might not post anything else tonight. I’ll go and read over the articles and think about them again.

The good in email notes that — despite all our complaints — email is still the preferred method of collaboration on the Internet.

The article suggests that this is because email is simple, universal, manageable, searchable, accessible, visible and can be personalised. In short, it “just works”:

It’s chaotic and overwhelming, but it works most of the time and there is no learning curve. A new employee can sit down at their new desk and they can immediately start sending and receiving messages, participating in email thread conversations, stay apprised of events and even delegate tasks; all without having to learn, navigate or configure a new interface. And, if that person wants to retrieve information from previous projects or historical data all they really need to do is open and search their Gmail or Yahoo account which they were probably forwarding most of their email to anyways.

The bad in email notes that — despite all our praise of it as collaboration tool — email is deeply flawed.

The data in people’s inboxes is “silo’ed”, stored in invisible, unsearchable mailboxes where collaborators can’t collaborate with it. That’s the worst thing about email:

What I mean by silo’ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it – the Email Inbox…. For many folks, the Email Inbox contains their most intimate secrets all mashed together into a single location: business correspondences, contracts, proposals, reminders, tasks, love letters, indiscreet online purchases, dirty jokes, pictures of your spouse (and kids), time-wasting games, inappropriate messages from co-workers and friends and lets not forget spam. I think its obvious that silo’ed data is devastating to team productivity. The snowballing effects of silo’ed data can debilitate even the strongest of project managers.

Email is also bad because it perpetuates “walled gardens”, is not secure and is not permissions-based (i.e. no scalable participation), because group emailing is complicated and difficult and because it just simply makes us lazy.

There is some stuff at the end of the second post about how important it is that we all move to the kind of collaboration tools that CentralDesktop makes, but that’s not the only conclusion one could draw from these thoughtful pieces.email, collaboration, productivitySimilar Posts:

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If you are into that sort of thing, you will find there a quick explanation of how to make smarter use of smart folders, an introduction to some useful extensions and details on setting up turning Thunderbird into a “collaboration tool” with the Calendar and SynKolab extensions.thunderbird, smart folders, extensions, calendar, synkolab, collaboration, email

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Among other things, the post points out that email is customisable and tweakable in ways that other modes of online communication are not, that it is universally available and accessible and that people understood what it is and how to use it.

You may remember a flurry of Internet opinion a few months ago forecasting the imminent death of email and/or the replacement of email with wikis and Instant Messaging.email, collaboration, IM, wiki, Web 2.0, internet, productivitySimilar Posts:

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