Late last year, I posted about Richard Valk’s “ISP in a box” project, which offered instructions for setting up a mail, web and more server on a Mac mini (or any Mac) at home.

Richard has now released “ISP in a box” 2.0, a series of blog posts with instructions and links to binaries that allow you to be your own ISP:

If you follow these documented steps you’ll end up with a Mac which you can use to host your and your friends’ websites by using an Apache2-based webserver which uses PHP 5 and can talk to a MySQL 5 database. This means you can install most PHP/MySQL based applications like for instance blogs or forums like WordPress and phpbb. You are also able to provide mail services for them with unlimited mailboxes, domains and web-based email services using Roundcube.

The end result is a system running Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.24, PHP 5.1.4, Postfix 2.3.2, Courier-IMAP 4.1.1, Courier-Auth 0.58, Cyrus-Sasl 2.1.18, Postfix admin 2.1.0 and Roundcube webmail 0.1 beta2.

Sounds like your kind of thing? Check it out .email in general, web hosting, php, dot it yourself, DIY, mail server, MySQL, Postfix, roundcube

Giles Turnbull has pulled out all the stops in a fine post on MacDevCenter. He discusses the the ins and outs of POP and IMAP, the rise and rise of Gmail, text messaging and the future of email in a three page whopper post.

Basically a stock-take of where email stands at the moment, along the way he takes in the free re-release of Mulberry, Google Apps for your domain and more.

For example, did you know that POP usage is gradually declining but IMAP is not taking off the way it should? I didn’t:

All email nuts should read what Giles has to say. A fine piece. email in general, IMAP, POP, gmail, text messaging, mulberry, google, apple mail, mail.app

Ashish Gulhati, CEO of email service provider Neomailbox , decided to dump Mail and give Thunderbird another try.

At first glance, he was impressed with the improvements since he last used it twelve months ago.

He even got inspired enough to list Thunderbird’s pros and cons. In short, he concluded, the Mozilla client “sure seemed to surpass Mail.app in terms of bleeding edge features.”

Then the rot set in and Thunderbird’s charms began to fade:

OK, so Thunderbird managed to delete a lot of my recent mail. Luckily, Mail.app had cached a copy of most of the messages. I’m also quite sick of Thunderbird’s frequent crashes, horrible search, flaky filters, and general instability. I’m switching back to Mail.app!

Sure, Thunderbird has all the bleeding edge bells and whistles, but none of the features work trouble-free, not even basic, core functionality. In the final analysis a mail program that works reliably at what it does is way more useful than one which has all the latest features, but nothing works.

Like the hare and the tortoise, Thunderbird streaks ahead in the comparison shootout at first, but slow and steady wins the race:

In the final analysis Apple’s Mail.app is still probably the most reliable, responsive, usable and full-featured email program available for OS X, or any platform for that matter.

mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email in general, pros and cons, happy users, unhappy users

GTDGMail is a Firefox extension that provides an excellent “Getting Things Done” (GTD) framework for Gmail. It also adds advanced search abilities in Gmail, which are very welcome whether you are into GTD or not.

If it had existed when I was compiling a list of ten GTD apps for Mac users, it would have come in near the top of the list. It’s a very clever stretch of Gmail’s existing label and filter features.

GTDGmail is very easy to install. Simply navigate to the site, click on the install link and follow the prompts in Firefox. A quick relaunch, load Gmail and you are good to go.

The extension comes with “wizards” to install common labels for contexts, actions and projects. Detailed instructions make it easy to create your own additional ones.

Access to the GTD labels is provided at the top of each Gmail message:

The inbox helpfully displays those labels at the start of the message’s subject line (some of my labels are coloured by the Gmail Label Colors Greasemonkey script — I like visual clues):

Additional tweaks offer easy emailing of tasks and references to yourself.

One other feature of the extension will please Gmail users even if they are not interested in the GTD approach. The GTD search function allows you to construct complex searches in Gmail much faster than you can manually:

Once you needed to enter the string “label:freelance label:Hawk-Wings after:17/8/2006″ into Gmail’s search box. Now it is just a matter of a few mouse clicks.

GTDGmail is freeware and well-supported with documentation, tips and hints on the developer’s web site.GTD, getting things done, firefox, gmail, productivity, extension, email in general

Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher is been updated so that it will work with any version of iPhoto 4.0 to 6.0.4.

By default, iPhoto’s “Send photos by email” feature only supports AOL, Eudora, Mail.app and Microsoft’s Entourage. iPhoto Mailer Patcher adds support for Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail and QuickMail Pro. Only Thunderbird misses out, due to its “unscriptability”.

Getting Simon’s hack to work with iPhoto 5 or 6 used to involve manually editing the ClientAppSignatures.plist file in iPhoto’s package. It was messy. Now it is all automated by the Patcher’s installer.

iPhoto Mailer Patcher is donation-ware and is available from Simon’s web site .iphoto, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, GyazMail, mailsmith, powermail, quickmail pro, email in general, photos, email, apple

Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer is thinking about switching to Mail.app.

He has had a gutful of his old mail client:

Mailsmith, by most rights, has stagnated. It pains me to write this, because as I said, I’m a really big fan of BareBones, and enjoy a great working relationship with their head-honcho, Rich Siegel. But it’s true… Mailsmith hasn’t had a public release/update since March of 2005. Now some folks may argue that it doesn’t need an update, and for those folks, I’m sure that’s correct. My big problem is that I manage a LOT of e-mail… I have almost 1400 mailboxes within which are nearly 200,000 e-mail messages. I pretty much save everything, and it’s saved my ass in HUGE ways over the years, so I ain’t gonna stop.

So, he wonders, does Mail.app have what it takes to manage a large number of mailboxes and bucketloads of email? Or is he better off archiving off a large slab of the emails and staying with Mailsmith?

My advice is not much good. I only have about 35,000 emails spread over four IMAP accounts and about ten mailboxes (see further, “How the delete key is your best friend”). That’s chicken feed by Dave’s standards.

Justin Blanton once ran a challenge to find the largest Mail mailbox, putting up his own inbox of 22,000 as a candidate.

What’s your experience? What’s your biggest mailbox? How many mailboxes does your Mail.app handle without working up a sweat?

Can Mail.app take the load? Does size matter?mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, email volume, biggest mailbox, switching, Mailsmith, email in general

Google has expanded and renamed its Gmail Notifier app so that it includes alerts and reminders from Google Calendar.

The revised app, now called Google Notifier, adds two icons to your menubar:

In the Preferences you can set which email client to use for composing messages, whether to display an unread message count and to receive pop-up alerts.

The Gcal pane offers similar options for your calendar events.

The email alerts are elegant and give you the sender, subject and a brief excerpt from each incoming email:

UPDATE: As Arsen points out in the comments, the new app has some rough edges. The endless loop of authentication requests can be short-circuited by turning the Gcal notifications off. Not ideal. Rather defeats the point of the updated app. No doubt a fix is on the way.

Google Notifier is freeware and is available from the Google site .

[Thanks for the prompt, Sander.]gmail, Google, email in general, gcal, notifier, notifications, alerts, menubar