If you ever stop blogging for a bit due to an insane period in your Real Life, you will notice that eventually collections of interesting things begin to pile up in your inbox.

Over the last little while, three helpful on-line tutorials have appeared which offer Mail.app users extra tips on smart mailboxes, spam protection and setting up IMAP accounts.

Merlin Mann at 43Folders has written up some good tips on smart mailboxes , how to make them and how to use them to make yourself more productive. He includes screenshots of some useful smart mailbox setups which are ripe for copying or for sparking off your own thinking about how smart mailboxes could make your life easier.

Macinstruct writer Matthew Cone explains how Mail.app users can better protect themselves from spam by outlining the main methods for catching spam, how Apple Mail’s “latent semantic analysis” spam filter works and how to make the best use of it. Finally, the explains how to set up SpamSieve for those who need extra Bayesian protection.

Dan Rubin has discovered that “a surprisingly large number of people don’t know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Apple’s Mail.app.” He plugs the gap with a “mini-tutorial” on get it right, including Mail.app’s mysterious ” Use this mailbox for…” option which trips a lot of people up.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, smart mailboxes, spam, IMAP, junk mail, email

Thomas McMahon has knocked out some styles for the “Stylish” CSS-extension that produce brighter, better looking labels in Thunderbird.

The Stylish extension is a user style manager: “Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.”

When you have installed Stylish, you can follow the instructions on Thomas’s web site to download some pre-made label styles that will turn your Thunderbird labels from this in to this:

And it’s not just a Mac-only solution as Thomas notes:

The new labels code has been tested in Thunderbird 1.5 and 2.0 on Mac and works great. It should work fine under Windows and Linux too.

thunderbird, mozilla, stylish, labels, CSS, hack, extension, not apple mail, not mail.app, email

Four months ago, Nick Kreeger announced the first release of Correo, a new open source email client for Mac — “Mac essence, Gecko powered” — that “blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application”.

The second public beta has just been released. Correo 0.2 adds several nice new features: Keychain support, Address Book integration, the ability to open messages in a separate window, attachment support, better message list support for IMAP accounts and a collapsable message header and attachment view.

Although Nick readily admits it is a work in progress, the interface already shows Camino’s good looks:

Address Book integration is the big leap forward for usability:

Also nice is the “auto-complete feature” in the To: and Cc: fields:

Underneath the polished exterior, it’s all Thunderbird. The account manager and new account dialogs will be instantly familiar to Thunderbird users.

And the rendering is all Gecko too, as the following ironic screenshot of the new “single window” mode illustrates:

Nick hopes to implement features as the app’s development unfolds, including, plugin capability (to allow development of extensions such as PDA synchronization) and a tabbed window interface.

You can download Correo 0.2 from Nick’s web site and keep up-to-date with new builds through his blog .thunderbird, not apple mail, not mail.app, camino, mozilla, gecko, email, address book

Bare Bones has announced a new public beta of Mailsmith, its (once upon a time) landmark email client.

Mailsmith 2.2 (beta) is a universal build, so it runs with all the grunt that an Intel Mac can provide.

It also changes the way in which email data is stored. Once you start using it, you can’t go back to Mailsmith 2.1.5.

The new version features an updated user interface:

Mailsmith picks up numerous changes to the UI, built-in text editing, and transformation abilities, all derived from BBEdit 8/TextWrangler 2. They are too numerous to list here, but generally fall into the realm of Unicode support, improved Mac OS X appearance and behavior, and various performance and behavior refinements.

Other updates include more options for handling compressed archives, the ability to import gzipped mbox files, a new “flag” option for messages, a new top-level menu for Bare Bones “Clippings” feature, improved display of emails composed with the “format=flowed” option (hurrah!) and more.

The full list of improvements is provided in an email from Bare Bones CEO Rich Siegal on the Mailsmith mailing list along with this warning:

Mailsmith 2.2 is not ready for release to the general public. It is pre-release software, which has not been completely tested or debugged. We will do our best to fix any bugs that are reported; but you must acknowledge, at least to yourself, that you are assuming a certain amount of risk by using this pre-release version; and that by assuming that risk, you accept all responsibility for the consequences of doing so.

If you dare, you can download a copy of the new beta from Bare Bones web site.

Mailsmith doesn’t support new-fangled things like IMAP or Exchange accounts.

[Via TUAW ]mailsmith, bare bones, email, not mail.app, not apple mail, format=flowed, POP

MacFreePOPs is one of two utilities that allow Mail.app users to access email from web-based services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and more.

MacFreePOPs 2.0, just released, adds two nice new features of the mix.

It now includes an auto-updater, which means that users no longer need to go through the hassle of manually updating the separate plugins for each individual web service. It also checks for updates to the main MacFreePOPs application and the underlying freepopsd engine which powers the plugins:

It is now also “half-universal”. That is to say, parts of the app are now compiled as universal binaries, although the main app is still needs Rosetta to run on Intel Macs. The developer is appealing for donations from happy users to cover the USD 500 cost of new software needed to update the whole app. There is more on this in the app’s readme file.

A new reset/uninstall command is also included.

This update narrows the gap between MacFreePOPs (donation-ware, more complicated) and MailForward (shareware, easier to use).

[Thanks, Gary!]mail.app, apple mail, webmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, squirrelmail, gmail, plugins, email

Zimbra has launched an alpha version of the Desktop client in Mac, Linux and Windows flavours for its open-source “Exchange-killer” collaboration platform.

The Mac version weighs in at 20 MB and requires Java Runtime Environment 1.5.x to run.

Once installed and connected to a Zimbra server, the client loads into a browser (Firefox, Safari) through local port 7633. It then downloads a local cache of your entire Zimbra account, allowing you to process your mail and calendar whether you’re online or not.

Next time a connection is established, any changes are synched up to the server.

It also comes with a menubar new mail notification utility — “Zimbra Toaster” — which will check for new mail every minute and lists the new mail in a drop-down menu.

I would love to show you some screenshots of the client in action, but work’s Zimbra test server is down. Frustrating but true.

I can, however, show you a screenshot of what happens when the Desktop client can’t establish a connection:

Edifying, eh? (TechCrunch’s server is up. It looks pretty much like the web interface.)

Download the Mac client and give it a whirl yourself.not mail.app, not apple mail, zimbra, desktop client, email, productivity

Michael Tsai has released an updated version of his spam-catching utility, SpamSieve, which adds support for Thunderbird and many other improvements.

Each update brings improvements to the way SpamSieve detects junk mail, and 2.6 is no exception, promising better detection of image spam, phishing scams and more accurate operation of the app’s Bayesian filter.

In addition, it now enables Growl notifications by default, has “improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard” and features a “more robust” Apple Mail plugin.

Michael lists many other improvements in the full changelog.

SpamSieve is shareware (USD 30) and is available from Michael’s web site .

[via MacNN ]mail.app. apple mail, junk, spam, thunderbird, email, leopard