Dane Harnett has updated his new WideScreenMail plugin, giving it the much-asked for two-line preview à la Entourage.

This was one of the features most requested of Letterbox, the Tiger wide-screen plugin.

Entourage, you will recall, displays mailboxes on the left, and the selected message in a preview pane on the right.

The middle pane offers a listing of the selected mailbox, with each line displaying the sender, subject line and time at which the email arrived:

Now, with WideScreenMail, Mail.app users can have the same layout. The middle column now displays the sender and the subject line in one field and the time of arrival (or whatever other column(s) you select):

And, of course, unlike Entourage, you are seeing Mail’s unified inbox, and don’t need to jump from account to account to answer your email.

Obviously, this reduces by one the number of columns needed in the middle pane and makes for a more efficient use of the available space.

Dane has made the new version of the WideScreenMail plugin available on his web site .

Still no further word on Letterbox progress.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, plugins, hacks, widescreen, entourage, outlook

Dane Harnett has released a widescreen plugin for Leopard Mail, which gives Mail.app an “Entourage” or “Outlook” look.

It is not as polished as Letterbox , the first and best of the widescreen plugins developed for Tiger Mail.

Aaron Harnly is working on the Leopard version , but if you really can’t wait, and plenty of people seem to think that this is the bees’ knees of email functionality, WideScreenMailPlugin will do the trick.

In essence it shifts the preview pane from the bottom to the right-hand side of Mail.app’s interface:

WideScreenMailPlugin is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .entourage, mail.app, apple mail, outlook, widescreen, hack, plugin

Two journalists from ITWorld Canada have put Exchange Server 2007 through its paces, testing it with a variety of email clients and web browsers.

They discovered a lot of interesting things about the new software’s junk mail catching abilities and security, but what grabbed my attention was the performance of Mail and Safari.

Unsurprisingly, Exchange Server 2007 works best with Outlook 2007.

However other clients were also tested:

Exchange 2007 server is also open for use with other e-mail client access methods, such as Thunderbird (the e-mail counterpart to Firefox) and Microsoft’s older Mac Office e-mail product called Entourage. This subpar access does not include any of the groupware-focused features, such as shared contact, mail, files/folders, group calendars and Microsoft SharePoint services.

The accessibility afforded for Exchange 2007 clients is quite varied. Obtaining simple e-mail access through standard POP3 and IMAP protocols across all clients was easy in our tests.

We used a number of e-mail client applications successfully, including Thunderbird (under Linux , MacOS, and Windows XP/Vista Ultimate), Apple Mail, and Netscape clients all ran successfully and flawlessly.

Good news for Mac users trapped in a Windows work environment. We are still second class citizens, but at least we can communicate with other workers, albeit at a reduced level.

They also tested Exchange Server 2007′s web-based mail service, Office Web Access (OWA) browser, and found that it “worked well” with Safari and Firefox.

The test revealed an odd security flaw:

The OWA browser application when connecting to Exchange 2007 does not support the option to suppress externally referenced content (usually pictures) that are situated on a Web site or other Internet source, letting the mail sender record that the content have been seen/read in the e-mail. This inability to suppress rich (and revealing) content is disturbing, as it leaves this security measure to be handled by third-party applications.

The article is three pages long. Subsequent sections discuss Exchange Server’s spam catching features and other security failings.email, outlook, exchange server 2007, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, entourage, microsoft, productivity, interoperability

GyazMail, an up-and-coming Cocoa-based email client for Mac Os X, has been updated.

The new version (1.5) brings some other welcome improvements as well as a big feature bump–IMAP support.

Adding support for the IPv6 addresses and the ability to save messages in plain text, RTF and other formats are fine additions to any client, but it’s IMAP support that finally makes GyazMail almost a grown-up email app.

The interface is unapologetically modelled on Mail.app:

There is not much that it cannot do. GyazMail supports multiple accounts, a variety of screen layouts including an “Outlook-style” wide-screen format, message threading, rules and filters, SSL/TLS support, labels, customisable keyboard shortcuts, some AppleScript support and more (see the full feature set on GyazMail’s web site).

Personally, I think Mail.app still holds the edge in at least two ways: the “Unified Inbox” and the ability to extend and customise it through plugins (two of the five reasons to be grateful for Mail.app).

But after fooling around with it for a day, I’m happily prepared to put it ahead of Mail’s two other main rivals, the Behemoth and the Wildebeest’s Butt.

GyazMail is shareware (USD 18), although you can try it for free first in a 40-day demo which is available at the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, entourage, email, imap

SidewinderX is an automated spam and phishing scam reporting tool.

At the click of an applescript it will process your Junk mailbox, determine the sending domain of all the junk mails inside it and report them to the abuse contact of that domain.

A new version (1.0.5), released a few days ago, includes scripts to automate the reporting for Mail.app, Entourage, Mailsmith, Eudora, and Powermail.

You can see a helpful screencast of how it works on the developer’s web site .

No doubt it’s clever; the real question is, is it smart?

Debate continues. Despite some miracle stories on the results of bouncing spam emails, there are some reasons why bouncing (or automated spam reporting) may not be a good idea.

You can read them in previous Hawk Wings post on “To bounce or not to bounce?” here and here.

Apple’s own technote on tries to distinguish between spam worth bouncing (or reporting) and spam that is not.

SidewinderX is sharware (USD 19.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, applescript, spam, junk, entourage, mailsmith, eudora, powermail, reporting

Email Backup and its shareware version Email Backup Pro have been updated.

The more fully-featured Email Backup Pro (shareware, USD 9.95) has improved restore functions, including the ability to restore backups made with the freeware version.

Also, you can now launch a restore by clicking on the backup file in Finder.

It now also supports GyazMail .

The freeware version (1.1.2) now quits the email client first in order to produce a more reliable backup.

You can read more about these simple backup utilities on the developer’s web pages for Email Backup and Email Backup Pro .mail.app, apple mail, email, thunderbird, entourage, eudora, gyazmail, backup

Email Backup Pro is an easy to use backup utility for all the major Mac email clients: Apple Mail, Entourage x.V and 2004, Thunderbird, Eudora.

Its simple interface and “set-and-forget” features make it hard for a user to claim that creating a regular backup is too much hassle. (See an earlier, more extensive Hawk Wings review.)

There is only one new feature in the 1.1 release, but it’s a good one—support for multiple email clients:

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .email, backup, restore, apple mail, mail.app, eudora, thunderbird, entourage