Gina Trapani has released an update to her excellent Better Gmail 2 extension for Firefox.

This is the Better Gmail extension that works with the new Gmail interface.

The new version adds four new features: One Click Conversations (quick access to previous emails from a particular sender), Hide Invites Box, Google Reader Integration (in the Sidebar) and Rollover Highlight Messages (which highlights message rows as you mouse over them).

It also marks the return of skins. Users can now choose between a Blue Skin and a Grays and Blue Skin (screenshot below):

The updated version is available from Lifehacker or from the Mozilla Extension Repository . Needless to say, it is freeware.gmail, not apple mail, not mail.app, productivity, greasemonkey, firefox, skins, conversations

Michael Boyle finds Mail frustrating to get around in.

He asks:

Why oh Why can’t Apple Mail allow me to navigate with the arrow keys the way NetNewsWire does? The relationship between the feeds pane and each feed’s posts in NNW is so fast and intuitive; whereas there seems to be no relationship between the mailboxes pane and the message panes in Apple Mail.

I am happy to admit that driving NetNewsWire with the keyboard alone is a pleasure.

However, it can also be done in Mail, even if the process is not quite as intuitive.

If you are keyboard-only kind of person, see an earlier Hawk Wings post “Moving around Mail.app using the keyboard“.mail.app, apple mail, Tips, keyboard shortcuts, tab key, conversations, netnewswire, productivity

A poster on macOSXHints explains how to move around Mail.app’s interface using the keyboard.

Like the keyboard shortcut for emailing a URL in Safari, this is another tip that may not be as well-known as it should be. A number of people emailed to say that they would like to see more “basic tips” on Hawk Wings, so I’m going to town on this one. Power users turn away now….

You can use the tab key to switch between the three areas of Mail.app’s interface — (1) the Mailbox Viewer, (2) The Message List Viewer, the (3) Preview Pane and the search field in the Toolbar:

The arrow keys help you to move around within each area. For example, as the poster on macOSXHints points out,

if you use Organize by Thread (from the View menu or otherwise) and the thread is collapsed, a shortcut to expand the thread and automatically select the first unread email in that thread is to have that thread selected, then just tap the right arrow.

You can now navigate up and down the thread with the arrows and re-collapse it with the left arrow.

You can navigate around, expand and contract mailboxes in the Mailbox Viewer in the same way.

These tips can save you time as you learn to work without the need for a mouse. You can save yourself more scrolling and dragging and dropping by using Mail Act-on to file emails with a keyboard shortcut.

Mail Type Select offers even more efficiency. With this plugin installed, the Message List Viewer will jump to the first match for any text string you type in just like Finder. Nifty!

[P.S. An Intel version of ecto 2.4.1 is out, in which this was posted for old time's sake. Via TUAW ]mail.app, apple mail, Tips, keyboard shortcuts, tab key, conversations, threaded view, productivity

MailFollowup is a Mail.app plugin that allows you to “follow up” or send subsequent thoughts to all the recipients of an email more easily and naturally.

It adds a “Followup” commands to Apple Mail’s Message and Contextual Menus, so that the To, Cc: and Bcc: addresses appear in the reply exactly as they appeared in the original message:

The developer Greg Welch has released an updated version that fixes a small problem in the Contextual menu.

Since I posted about this plugin in April, it has also been recompiled as a universal binary and plays better with Mail Act-on.

MailFollowup is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .plugins, mail.app, apple mail, conversations, email, replying