A poster on macOSXHints points out a smart use for the “tokenised” email addresses that Mail.app places in its To: and Cc: fields.

Coincidently, I stumbled across another unexpected use for this at work today.

The macOSXHints poster explains how to quickly enter email addresses in to a web form by first entering the name into a new Mail.app message. Mail auto-completes the names, providing those nice aqua tokens.

These can be be selected and dragged over to the web form, where they transform into a comma-separated list of email addresses. Clever.

But there’s more. Today at work I had to suggest the creation of a new internal mailing list. Rather than type all the email addresses out, I tried the same trick.

I entered the names in the To: field of the message, let Mail auto-complete them, then selected them all and dragged them into the body of the email. Voila! — a nice, comma-separated list of email addresses appeared:

This is not a high-use tip. I’ve been using a Mac for four years now, and this is the first time I was moved to try it. Still, it’s nice to know that it is there, waiting for me to discover all over again when I need to do this in 2011.

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Sven-S. Porst is playing it cool. While I gush on about the many reasons to love Mail.app, he is more restrained.

He uses Mail, even though it “may not be the best Mail application around” and even though the lozenge icons in Tiger Mail make him “puke over my keyboard just for reading my e-mail”.

One thing annoys him more than anything:

the fact that it automatically sets the sender address for new messages based on the message that is currently selected in your inbox.

This means that he often sends out email from an inappropriate alias.

Luckily, it is easy to stop Mail.app doing this and to set an unchanging default email address for all your new emails.

The option for this can be found in the Composing pane of Mail’s Preferences:

By default, Mail sends new email with the sender’s address drawn from the last mailbox you were viewing. Clicking on the drop-down menu allows you to specify a different email address that Mail will then always use when you compose a new message.

Sven-S. argues that not seeing this option before is Mail’s fault, the result of poor interface design. The “Send new mail from” title for the option is misleading, he says:

So what does that look like? Right, like a feature for people who are using several accounts. But that’s not me. To simplify things, I’m essentially forwarding all the messages from my various accounts to a single place and I’m just querying that one (and the other ones just need to exist because apparently you need to set up a whole account for Mail to be able to use different sender addresses). So all the messages I have in my inbox already live in a single account. And if Mail just used the address associated to that account, everything would be nice and dandy.

Personally, I like the way Mail handles this. More often than not, I want to compose a new message with my work alias when I have been reading work email, from the blog address when reading Hawk Wings emails. But for those with different tastes or email configurations, this tip may prevent you puking on your keyboard.

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Andreas Amann has updated his excellent conversion utility for Eudora, Mail.app and Thunderbird again.

The new version (4.6.1) features the following improvements and bugfixes:

1. it fixes a possible infinite loop when importing Thunderbird messages with inconsistent end-of-line characters within a single header.
2. Potential crashes due to corrupt Content-Type headers in multipart messages have been fixed.
3. It no longer produces a malformed rules file for Mail.app when importing Eudora filters based on «Label».
4. When importing mailboxes from Windows, it now removes folder/mailbox suffixes in all caps.

Andreas has also produced a chart that shows EMC’s conversion abilities:

It can convert from Eudora to Mail.app, from Eudora to Thunderbird and from Thunderbird to Mail.app. Very handy indeed.

Andreas makes this software available for free but does not refuse donations from satisfied users. You can get Eudora Mailbox Cleaner — and his excellent Mail Scripts — from his web site .

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A new widget has been released for the very security conscious or for those troubled by spam.

Email Cloaker encodes your email address making it harder for spammers to harvest it for their mailing lists.

It offers two different types of encoding, javascript (right) or HTML character entities (left):

A widget for this seems slightly like overkill to me.

Unless you change your email address often, it might be easier to use a web-based service like Email Address Encoder once, store the result in a text file and just re-use it as needed.

The widget is freeware and is available in Apple’s widget library .

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Plaxo, an online contact management service, has released a beta version of its plugin for Address Book.

The Plaxo service allows you to synchronise contact information, to update the information of contacts who are also Plaxo members automatically and to ask for updated contact information from others.

The idea is to keep ahead of the endless changes in phone numbers and email addresses that cause you gradually to lose contact with people.

With the plugin much of the work of keeping your contact information current is made automatic. Its preferences allow you to “set and forget” the synchronisation and update options. It also adds a collapsable pane to each Address Book contact that enables you to manually request an update on contact information and displays a history of your communication with that person (this feature is “coming soon”).

Last year Plaxo struck a deal with AOL to manage the contact information for AOL’s Triton Instant Messaging application. Unlike some other apps, Plaxo has also opened up its API to third-party developers.

Services like this are not for everyone. It’s not for me. Despite Plaxo’s strong privacy policy, I’m not happy loading up my contact information into some third-party’s database.

Oddly, I do almost the same thing hourly with iSync and don’t think twice about it. Somehow I trust Apple more. I’m such a babe-in-the-woods.

But if you are interested in testing out a service like this (you can delete your Plaxo account and all your information entirely if you change your mind), download the beta of Plaxo’s Address Book plugin and give it a try.

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