A policewoman in Melbourne took a photo of herself — in uniform, shirt unbuttoned, seductively posed, name badge showing — and sent it to her boyfriend as a get well message.

He (cad) emailed it to a few friends and soon (whadda ya know?) it’s all over the police email system and the local news.

She now faces an Ethical Standards investigation and the possible loss of her job.

Claire Swire (lest we forget — Wikipedia ) first blazed the trail of email stupidity, but it seems that others are only too willing to follow in her footsteps.

I guess the moral of the story here is the same as it was in 2000.

As the BBC put it at the time, “Email in haste, repent at leisure”:

Of all the technological innovations of recent decades, few have the ability to wreck your life quite as quickly, and to quite the same extent, as e-mail…

…The lesson is clear: e-mail may be quick and cheap, but it has its drawbacks. It’s more bother to find a stamp and address an envelope, but at least it gives you time to reflect on the wisdom of sending the contents in the first place.

Readers lacking in imagination will find more (or less) coverage here and here .not apple mail, not mail.app, email, think first, internet, claire swire

Juan Ignacio Leon’s excellent iPhoto2Gmail plugin has been updated and now offers even smarter ways for Gmail users to email photos from iPhoto.

Basically, it adds a pane to iPhoto’s “Export…” dialog:

The updated version offers a Contacts button that pulls down your Gmail contacts so that you pick the recipient(s) from that list.

Other new features include:

- A bugfix for RAW and other non-jpeg files that were not properly renamed when scaled.
- A fix for some situations in which the plugin would try to send message without recipients.
- Re-written code to be Object Oriented and Modular for maintainability.

You can get the revised version from Juan’s web site .iphoto, gmail, photos, webmail, plugin, web 2.0, integration, email

Michael Rothwell has written the code of his IMAP-IDLE plugin from the ground up to produce version 1.06 of his IMAP-IDLE which brings the “push mail” function to Mail.app.

When the plugin is installed, your IMAP server tells Mail.app when new mail arrives rather than Mail needing to poll the server repeatedly without finding anything new. This is obviously faster, more efficient and smarter.

The new version also features a new icon and and the beginnings of a Preference Pane:

I asked Michael what exactly had prompted the rewrite and he told me, “I switched to an OO design from the c-style switch-statement design. So the code is cleaner, and it works better.”

At which point I quickly realised I am too stupid to understand what actually happened, but that whatever it was, it’s good.

Michael also suggests on his web site that Leopard Mail is rumoured to have the IDLE feature built-in. That’s bad news for the IMAP-IDLE plugin, but good news for everyone else.

You can get IMAP-IDLE 1.06, which is freeware, from Michael’s web site . imap, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, push mail, oo design, c-style switch statement, email

Mac OS X Tips UK has written up a list of tips to wring the most out of the menubar helper for Google services like Gmail and Google Calendar.

It shows you how to set the default number of messages displayed using the hidden Defaults Editor.

You can also set the Notifier to display only email matching a particular label in the same way.

Of course, the Defaults Editor just a fancy GUI to Notifier’s preferences file — com.google.GmailNotifier — stored in your ~/Library/Preferences folder, which you can edit directly with Proprty List Editor or any text editor.

The list also mentions Gmail+Growl , a plugin for Google Notifier that passes notification of new messages to the Growl alert system .Gmail, google, calendar, menubar, notification, not apple mail, not mail.app, email, tips

DoBeDo, one of the smarter iCal widgets, has just been updated.

The new version (2.5) can be resized, adds support for groups of calendars, task clustering and scheduling and offers “natural language” support for due dates.

It now also supports international date formats, which is good news for people who put their months in the right place.

The widget comes with three skins. The one on the left, Duke, is new:

It has a built-in drop-down dialog for entering new tasks:

After the task is created, another drop-down calendar makes assigning a due date easy.

Printer settings allow you to nominate a default printer for printing lists of tasks or the option to preview it as a PDF first.

It now also come with hotkeys. ⌘-D will show or hide dates and priorities, ⌘-F expands the tasks beyond the user-determined future date.

And in a nice touch, ⌘-E will email a list of the tasks to an address you specify:

Some bugfixes round out the new version.

DoBeDo is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, productivity, to-dos, widget, dashboard, email, hotkeys, calendar

Florian Beer has posted two tips which stop Mail.app syncing Exchange’s public folders.

One of them has been covered on Hawk Wings before, but the other one brings the list of possible work-arounds to four:

1. Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
2. Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
3. Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
4. Lock the local cache. Florian’s second tip explains how to lock your local cache folders so that Exchange can’t sync with them.

Caveat Lector — I have absolutely no experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and no interest in acquiring some. mail.app, apple mail, microsoft, exchange server, imap, public folders, perl, local cache, email

I’m not sure how long this has been up on the Apple web site. I’ve never noticed it before.

Apple has created a preview of the HTML Stationery that will be available in Leopard Mail.

As regular readers of Hawk Wings will already expect, I’m not big fan. But don’t let that rob you of the pleasure you’ll no doubt get from exploring the kinds of productivity leaps that Leopard Mail will offer.

The nine examples fall into standard stationery categories — thank-yous, news, get well soon messages, invitations, Valentine’s Day and so on.

Here are just two examples of what we can look forward to, a thank-you and a Birthday email:

“Mail. You’ve got more”, reads the tag line on the Apple web site.

Never a truer word. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, stationery, html, oh dear, email