In a post on the Mailplane Google Group he explains:

Until recently, a Mailplane single user license was limited to two Macs. Because many users needed Mailplane on more Macs, I’ve decided to lift this limitation:

• Single-user license: *Install on all Macs you personally use.* Use it at home, school, work: just anywhere. *Limitation:* Make sure you’re the only user. Please do not share your license with anyone else.
• Family license: Allow up to five (5) family members *living in the same household* to use Mailplane on their Macs. As with the single user license, there is no machine limitation for any of the five users.
• Site license: For a number of users working at the same organization. Again, each user may use it anywhere.

As a result individuals will pay only USD 24.95 to use it on as many Macs as they own. The family licence costs USD 39.95. For a site licence covering 20 users or more, the price per licence drops to USD 17.95.

Mailplane is not just a slick way into Gmail’s web interface. It adds additional features like “drag and drop” attachments, the ability to integrate multiple Gmail accounts, enabling new mail notifications, sending screenshots and integration with the productivity app OmniFocus through a bespoke plugin.

If you are tempted to be unfaithful to mail.app and start an affair in the Cloud with Gmail (as I am from time to time), Mailplane is a very good investment.

It was good value for money before. Now, for people with more than two macs (like me), it is even better.

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Along the way, he considers what to make of the current “email is dead” meme, how to assess objectively the impact of the facebook phenomenon, why Gen Z (or whatever we are up to) still needs its email addresses, the innovative nature of Gmail’s design and also hazards a guess at what Google Wave might mean.

It’s worth reading. Check it out at TidBITS: “Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications”

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Hawk Wings has covered Emailchemy before.

It can convert emails and mailboxes from an astonishing number of email clients (AOL for Windows, Claris Emailer, CompuServe Classic for Macintosh, CompuServe 2000 for Windows, Entourage (Database, .rge Archives and cache files), Eudora, Mail.app, Mozilla, Mulberry, Musashi, Neoplanet, Netscape, Opera, Outlook for Windows, Outlook Express for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX/Solaris, PowerTalk/AOCE for Macintosh, QuickMail Pro for Macintosh and Windows, Thunderbird, Yahoo! Mail and any other UNIX-style or mbox-format mailbox—whew!) into “mbox” format, mail spool, or “UNIX-style” mailboxes, folders of individual email files (.txt or .eml files), comma-separated value files (.csv files), IMAPdir (Binc IMAP maildir) or Maildir++ (Courier IMAP maildir) format, or IMAP formats usable by Outlook, Outlook Express, Entourage, Mail.app, and Thunderbird.

Matt recounts how he moved from his beginnings in mail on UNIX (in 1990, when I was still fooling around on a PC with Waffle, Fidonet and UUCP email) through a dizzying sequence of email clients mandated by “corporate policy” at work and the march of software progress at home:

I went from using Eudora at work to using Apple’s PowerTalk, and from that to using WordPerfect Office (aka Groupwise), Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and finally Microsoft Outlook. Then, to further complicate matters, I went from using Eudora at home to using Apple’s PowerTalk, Claris Emailer, and Netscape Mail, back to Eudora again, and then finally Apple’s Mail.app that came with Mac OS X.

It’s all very nostalgic! No wonder he ended up with “years of archived email saved in files created by several different applications that no other application could read.”

That’s enough to convert anyone into an ardent disciple of open formats.

If you are in the same bind, Emailchemy (shareware — USD 29.50) may well be the tool for you.

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Kelly Turner kicks things off with a confession about her bulging inbox, its 35,000 emails and the level of self-deception involved in telling herself that her system was working:

…I often lost track of messages that still needed to be dealt with. As new messages arrived and older ones disappeared from my screen, I seldom thought to scroll down to see what was still unread. And although I’d developed elaborate coping mechanisms (using colors and flags and searches to identify messages) simply having an ocean of e-mail in front of me made the process of answering and checking e-mail seem like a Herculean task.

This forms a nice segue to the first part of Joe Kissel’s three-part “email renovation” series. He begins with a series of tips on reducing the amount of traffic that comes into your inbox in the first place—dealing with spam, all those hilarious joke-a-minute emails that your friends and family insist on circulating, learning what belongs in Mail.app and what belongs in iChat and more.

Part Two is on “Meet your new filing system”. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t mention Mail Act-on and MailTags , the two premier organisational plugins for Mail.app.

If you can’t wait for Joe’s next installment you can browse through past posts of mine (one, two, three) on getting things done with Mail Act-on and MailTags. Or read them now and see how much better Joe’s tips are when he posts them!

Joe also takes the chance to put up some links to articles he wrote in February 2007 on “clearing away the clutter” in your inbox. Anything by Joe is worth the time spent reading it. These are no exception.

Finally, Joe has written a piece on coming to grips with notes and to-dos in Leopard Mail. He offers some smart tips on moving your calenders and to-dos to an IMAP account. However, be sure to read the comments as well and see what problems people are having with getting iCal to behave.

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Although it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from Entourage 2008.

MacWorld’s verdict?

There are several other new or improved features relating to e-mail or calendaring, but they apply only to users in corporate environments that connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Given that it’s been four long years in the making, it’s a missed opportunity that Entourage 2008 hasn’t also added some of the best new features found in Mail, such as automatic detection of physical addresses and dates, or e-mail stationery templates.

Entourage gets points for more complete AppleScript-ability, for compatibility with Mac OS X’s Services and for looking nicer, but when you get down to business — backing up your email and working with other apps — things look less rosy.

Negrino notes Microsoft’s advice that Entourage’s monolithic database be excluded from Time Machine backups and that users employ “alternative backup methods” instead. This is not only a pain in the butt, but cuts across the comprehensive design of Time Machine as a “set and forget”, everything-that-matters-to-you backup system.

Working with iCal is also fraught in Negrino’s view:

When you first synchronize Entourage with Sync Services, it creates an Entourage calendar in iCal, replicating your Entourage events in iCal. If you add or change events in that Entourage calendar in iCal or on a mobile device, those events will be synchronized back to Entourage’s internal calendar. But there’s no way to bring events from other iCal calendars (such as the default Home, Work, or Birthdays calendars) into Entourage’s internal calendar. Put another way, Entourage can publish data to iCal, but can’t subscribe to any of iCal’s other calendars. In effect, Entourage uses iCal as a convenient conduit to synchronize its data to other devices, but doesn’t treat iCal as a full calendaring partner.

After getting to the end of the review, I was surprised by the final sentence:

“Finally, if you’re outside of the corporate realm, and need a mail, calendar, and contact manager with lots of headroom and solid integration with the rest of the Office suite, Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.”

Are you?

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It basically does the same thing as MacFreePOPs, now also released for Leopard.

The plugin comes in a disk image with an installer and a detailed PDF on how to use it.

Daniel provides a handy list of how far the Leopard development has come:

He also outlines how to set up a Hotmail account in Mail.app using the plugin. He reminds users that older free Hotmail and MSN accounts will probably work but that newer one may need to be upgraded to Hotmail Plus .

HHTPMail is freeware and available from Daniel’s web site (but not yet from its sourceforge page ).

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The video demonstrates the creation of an event in Entourage’s calendar, giving a sense of appointment features familiar (colour-coding for each calendar) and unfamiliar (allowance for travelling time to and from the appointment).

The new, previously-seen “My Day” Desktop interface for Entourage also gets a good work out. You get to see the creation of a to-do, the reordering of to-dos and other bits and pieces.

Since I am feeling grumpy with Leopard iCal at the moment (although not as grumpy as Pierre Igot at Betalogue who today rightly unloads on iCal’s lack of keyboard support ), it all looks pretty attractive.

It pains me a bit to say it, but here is something that looks like it works. And gives users some control over how to manage their to-dos and events and edit them easily. Of course, it may be a different story when we actually have the app in our hands.

See the sneak-peak for yourself below or on the Office:Mac 2008 web site :

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It brings mysterious backend changes which enhance “the performance and the usability” of Gmail, as well as new features for contact management and more.

Two things will strike Hawk Wings readers at once.

First, the new interface breaks the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Its keyboard macros, quick navigation, coloured labels, advanced composing options and more make Gmail a pleasure to use.

Luckily Gina Trapani (a productivity goddess) is quick off the mark, and Better Gmail 2.0 is already available, although with a vastly decreased feature set, as she waits for the developers of each feature to update their code. Still, it already contains the keyboard shortcuts which are the key feature for speeding up your Gmail experience.

Secondly, Safari 3.0 is not fully supported. For example, on a cosmetic note, compare the contact manager layout on Google’s blog (top) with how it looks in Safari 3.0 (below):

Other early adopters of Leopard may agree that it is possible to spend too much time on the bleeding edge of innovation. Luckily, you can opt to use the old interface instead by clicking on “Older Version” next to the Settings.

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will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it.

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So nothing is more annoying than people who thoughtlessly waste time and effort by composing their emails badly. Once a week perhaps, sometimes more, I find myself looking at an email with a death wish.

Scott Young has composed a list of seven bad email habits that make readers want to kill you.

He lists the obvious offenders — the hanging question, the buried request (with a fine example of how not to ask a question), and bulky paragraphs — as bad in snail mail as they are in email and which come from unthinking composition in any medium.

But then there are the email-specific sins. Think carefully enough about your email, he suggests, to work out if email is the right tool for the task:

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

This extends to using email as emergency communication for urgent requests. If you need a response right away, the phone (or getting up and walking down the corridor) is the answer, not email. Don’t forget there are people who (unbelievably) only answer their emails once or twice a day.

And lastly he lists my most besetting sin, being an email smart arse:

Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t…. And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming.

Sometimes, I find myself going so flat-chat to get to Inbox Zero that I dash stuff off without thinking, thus unwittingly making even more work for myself. It’s a kind of anti-productivity strategy.

There must be a better way. “Festina lente”, as Erasmus (Wikipedia ) might have said when opening his own inbox.

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