The promised new-look interface for .Mac Mail is here and it looks good.

A month ago Apple announced a new look for its webmail service, based on the look of Apple Mail, powered by Ajax and with some keyboard shortcuts à la Gmail thrown in.

In general, the announcement met with cautious welcome, although many wondered if it would be enough to stem criticism of Apple’s online offerings.

Now we can all see for ourselves.

The interface looks just like Mail.app except for an Address Book search field in the bottom left:

Preferences offer further options for two-pane or three-pane viewing, large or small mailbox icons, keyboard shortcuts or not, mailbox behaviours, number of messages to view at a time and more.

The most innovative new thing is the introduction of the single-letter keyboard shortcuts pioneered by the Gmail interface.

No doubt many people will find these more convenient that the multiple-keystroke combinations required in the Desktop app, both easier to remember and easier to execute.

Die-hards like me will find themselves pressing the Desktop combinations and wondering why nothing happens, but we will adjust.

Drag and drop is very smooth and welcome, especially as the webmail interface doesn’t allow for all the plugins one might otherwise use to make filing easier and quicker.

If you have a .Mac account, check in and test it out for yourself. Otherwise see Apple’s pitch on it. Is it all you hoped for?

[Derik DeLong - and just about everyone else - beat me to it]mail.app, apple mail, Dotmac, webmail, interface, gmail, keyboard shortcuts, apple

A poster on macOSXHints has posted a tip to reduce the long delays in producing a reply window that sometimes occur in Mail.

He suggests that it caused by settings in the Keychain and provides a work-around to fix it.

I had this problem earlier in the year. In my case, it wasn’t caused by Keychain settings, but by my .Mac account.

I won’t repeat it all here, but you can read the whole saga in “Apple Mail phones home too” where you will also find the fix.

In short, Mail was trying to connect through port 80 to verify my iChat certificate. My work firewall blocks port 80. Hence the delay.

Interesting that Mail phones home in an unannounced but benign way, don’t you think? mail.app, apple mail, dotmac, .Mac, iChat, certificate, keychain, bugs

While .Mac has come in for (mostly) justified criticism in recent months (e.g. here, here, here and here), I noticed an improvement worth celebrating last night.

Three months ago during a rash of .Mac outages, downtime was handled quite differently by Fastmail (rare, detailed outage explanations, fast response) and .Mac (frequent, vague or incomplete outage explanations, lagging response).

Now things are much better. My .Mac mail was down last night. A visit to .Mac’s system status alerts showed much improved descriptions of what was wrong and how many people it was affecting.

I’m happy to bag .Mac when it deserves it, but I think that small advances like this are worth highlighting too.

It did start me wondering though. How many people does 2% of .Mac users actually represent? dotmac, apple mail, mail.app, .mac, outages, system status

Joe Kissell, author of Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and senior editor for TidBits , has written up a bagful of Mail.app tips in a piece for MacWorld.

He covers creating smarter searches in Mail using Boolean operators (things like this — jack & (jill | hill) ! water), how to check Gmail and AOL accounts in Apple Mail, getting the most out of aliases in .Mac, and using iCalMail to send reminders from iCal (clever tip!).

He also offers some tips for getting the most out of Address Book using your Bluetooth-enabled mobile / cell phone.

It’s like the whole of Hawk Wings artfully compressed into half a web page. Essential. mail.app, apple mail, tips, ical, address book, searches, gmail, aol, .Mac, dotmac

.Mac users who have their email set up as a POP account but would like to change it to the newer (and better) IMAP format, can find help in a thread on the Apple Discussion Boards.

A user in that situation asked for guidance and received two useful replies which set out different methods for making the switch.

Allan Sampson’s procedure (the second reply) seems simplest.

Following the steps set out there will make sure no emails are lost or accidently deleted by Mail.app’s unpleasant POP account ambush.mail.app, apple mail, tips, pop, imap, switching, dotmac, .mac, ambush

Apple is offering a teasing preview of its new-look .Mac webmail interface.

The obvious goal is to make it feel as much like using Mail.app as possible. Hence the general look complete with the much-loved Tiger lozenges, auto-completing email addresses from Address Book and message flagging.

It also adds bits and pieces from elsewhere: Ajax-like drag and drop à la Yahoo!’s new interface and inline display of the start of the message from GMail, but it also has a trick of its very own.

As a “.Mac webmail exclusive”, a Quick Reply feature lets you “dash off a response without leaving your Inbox”.

Will it be enough to silence .Mac’s many, many, many, many critics or even moderate their complaints? Only time will tell.

[Via TUAW ]mail.pp, apple mail, .mac, dotmac, webmail, gmail,

Over the past few months, a number of people have noticed a sharp increase in spam in their .Mac accounts and have wondered why a premium service like .Mac doesn’t include server-side spam filtering.

Scott Murray has decided to do something about it. He has written an AppleScript that automates the reporting of spam to spam@mac.com and spam@uce.gov, the US Federal Trade Commission’s official spam-report mailbox.

Using this script, he hopes, will “let the .Mac team know about all this spam, so they can crank up the juice on their filters.”

Instructions for installing and using the script can be found on Scott’s web page .dotmac, .mac, spam, email, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, plugins, junk