If you have Photoshop and a bit of patience, it is easy to roll your own stamp icon for Mail.app.

Thanks to John Godfrey, you can download an icon template in PSD format from his web site.

The zip file contains instructions on how to insert your desired image into the template. It helps if you rotate it about 11.2 degrees counter-clockwise and resize it to a width of about 85-90 pixels.

When the image is ready, you can use a freeware utility like img2icns to convert it into an icon file.

Img2icns has just been updated. The new version (0.3) is a universal binary, handles .tiff files better and is smarter about saving the finished product.

Obviously, you can have an enormous amount of fun playing around with this:

Here, after ten minutes work, are a Cult of Mac icon, a productivity-enhancing Merlin Mann talisman, a Daring Fireball logo and a Leopard stamp, just itching for 10.5 to be released.

The template itself has a small graphical bug in it. The space between the lines in the postmark is not fully transparent. It’s not fatal, but I can’t fix it without wrecking the rest of the image (Photoshop genius that I am). Perhaps you can.

Once your .icns file is ready, you can follow the instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post to replace Mail.app’s default icon.

So get to it. Post me your coolest work and win the coveted “Hawk Wings Icon of the Week” award.mail.app, apple mail, icon, dock, tips, stamp icons, make your own

I keep track of To Dos with iCal (and MailTags). That’s good enough for me, especially as I try hard not to have too much to do.

If you are very busy person or a hardcore ToDo list maker, you are going to love ToDo X. It is the fully-tooled-up Rolls Royce of To Do lists, with dedicated features that leave iCal’s comfy Corolla in the shade.

Read on after the jump to see the screenshots and read the rest of this review.

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Docktopus is an app that allows you to place “Mail.app-style” badges on a number of Dock icons.

The available icons range from disk and memory usage badges for each app to app-specific badges like an iCal events badge.

Badges can be dragged onto Dock icons from the app’s badge interface:

Two of the badges — the Mail badge and iCal events badge — double as notification screens.

The Mail one offers a smoked glass listing of unread emails by sender, topic and account:

The updated version released today includes a number of bugfixes and adds support for Entourage 2004′s Dock icon.

MacWorld gave Docktopus a “Best of Show 2006″ award. It is shareware (USD ) and is available from the developer’s web site .badges, mail.app, apple mail, dock, icons, notification, ical, entourage, docktopus

I often want to send a quick Mail.app message while I am working in another app. I can switch to Mail, start a new message and type in the recipient’s name, or I can find a faster way.

Hawk Wings reader Joshua Keay emailed me his method of doing this quickly. He created a file that is a text clippiing with the “mailto:” tag at the beginning of it.

He keeps it inside his applications folder, even though it isn’t an app per se. Then he dragged it to his dock. Now, when he clicks on it, it opens a new message, something that he says “potentially saves me a zillion clicks per year”:

You can get the file here (he uses an icon from Icon Factory).

If you use Quicksilver, you will already know that it is possible to achieve nearly the same thing with a more keystrokes. a few strokes for the contact’s name, a few more to bring up “Compose email”, Return and you’re away:

For really, really quick messages, you can follow Merlin Mann’s Quicksilver tip .

There may be even faster ways to do this. If you know one, I’d be glad to know.quick message, email, Dock, mailloc, quicksilver, mail.app, apple mail, tips

Every now and then, something comes along like Paparazzi (grab a screenshot of a whole web page) which has nothing to do with Mail.app but is so useful or excellent that I want to blog it anyway.

Knockout Dock is such an app. It gained me an inch of extra screen real estate and cost me nothing.

Read about it and how to survive in a Dock-less world after the jump.

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Nothing to do with Apple Mail at all, but TransparentDock 2.3.5 is out. It is fully compatible with 10.4.3.

(TransparentDock is an app that can modify the appearance of your Dock in a number of ways, including the ability to make it transparent).

So many notification options exist for Apple Mail — “loud” ones like iAlert or MailAppetizer, discreet ones like MailUnreadStatusBar, spoken ones like the Announce Mail or Spoken Sender Applescripts — that it is possible to overlook Mail’s built-in notification features.

Mail.app can announce new mail with an audio file that you can configure yourself in the General tab of the Preferences pane.

It can also let you know that new mail has arrived by bouncing its icon in the Dock. You can easily activate this by setting up this rule:

Apple Mail doesn’t have a rule condition called “Message is not Junk” that would prevent the icon bouncing for Junk. If you know how to do this in a smarter way, let me know.

If the sight of anything at all bouncing in the Dock annoys you, you can disable attention-seeking icon bouncing permanently with Insanity’s free Dock Detox haxie, which requires Insanity’s APE to run.bonucing icon, dock, apple mail, mail.app, notification, rule