Most recently, while I was busy…

1. KIT (“Keep It Together”), a nice personal information manager that almost gives Yojimbo a run for its money, was substantially updated. It now boasts a slicker interface, searchable tags, five star rating (à la iTunes) and more — see the full changelog for all the improvements.
2. OMIC got an update too. This utility which unpacks the dreaded winmail.dat files Outlook users sometimes send (see earlier Hawk Wings review) now has support for installation over Apple Remote Desktop and for RTF text, and is packaged in a smarter installer.
3. MailRecent 1.0.3 now adds any moves or copies using a MailRecent menu to the “Move to … Again” (or “Copy to … Again”) menu items in the Message menu and the corresponding contextual menu. This means that the last “recent” move or copy can be repeated via that menu item or the built-in Mail keyboard shortcut Option-Command-T.

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At the end of the day, some people just like having things organised neatly into instantly recognisable piles.

For them Doug Hellman has produced an applescript that automates the process of archiving emails by year and month.

As he says on his web site, “Each time it processes a message, it automatically maintains a folder hierarchy based on the parent, year, and month”. Doug also provides instructions on setting it up to work with a Mail Act-on rule.

The script has recently been updated.

In version 1.2 he has updated the scripts,

to make them more reliable as mail rule actions by using the perform_mail_action hook and taking the selection from the info passed in instead of asking Mail for the current selection.

I don’t know what this means, but it impresses the hell out of me. mail.app, apple mail, applescript, archiving, filing, sorting, folders, month, year, tipsSimilar Posts:

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The updated version now distinguishes duplicate mailbox names by adding the account to which they belong.

It is also smarter about dealing with people who try to use it with the number of recent items to display (you can set this in the Appearances pane of System Preferences) set to zero.

It is now a kick-ass, error-free plugin for people who like to file their messages quickly in this way.

At the same time, Dan Frakes at Macworld has written up a nice review of both Greg’s Mail plugins — MailRecent and MailFollowup — for his MacGems column.

He covers them in praise,

MailFollowup and MailRecent are sure to be welcome by heavy users of Mail. And the best thing about them is that they’re so well integrated into Mail that they seem as if they’ve been part of the app from the beginning. (And some would argue that they very well should have been.)

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MailRecent provides a quick filing solution for Mail.app.

It adds three new menus — “Copy to Recent”, “Move to Recent”, and “Go to Recent” — to Apple Mail. Each of these contains dynamically-updated lists of recently used mailboxes:

The number of mailboxes listed in the menus is controlled by the “Number of Recent Items” setting for Documents in the Appearance panel of the OS X System Preferences.

By default MailRecent sorts the mailboxes alphabetically, but Greg provides instructions for some Terminal commands to sort them by time or frequency of use.

One small thing. The plugin only lists the name of the mailbox. So, for example, if you have three accounts each with an “Archive” mailbox, you will not be able to tell from the list which one is which.

UPDATE: Greg emails to say that this kind of ambiguity shouldn’t arise. The Usage section on the plugin’s page says that, “If you transfer to one or more mailboxes that happen to have the same name, the menu item titles will be extended with a minimal distinguishing path to the mailbox. This is true whether the “duplicate” mailboxes (same names) are in the same or different mail accounts.” The extension doesn’t appear for me, but it might be there for you. It works for Greg.

Personally, I use Mail Act-on for my filing, but this provides another neat solution to getting mail out of your inbox and where it belongs quickly.

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1. Address Book Dates (Age, star sign and iCal link for Address Book contacts) was added to the Address Book section.
2. LinkABoo (hyperlinks to Apple Mail messages in other apps) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
3. “Show Emails from…” (a quick way to list in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular contact) was added to the Address Book section.
4. MsgFiler (a “quick file” plugin for Mail.app) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. IMAP-IDLE plugin (provides support in Mail.app for IMAP’s IDLE command) was added to the Added Functionality section.
6. Google Calendar plugin for Address Book (auto-fill Google Calendar events with contact information from your Address Book) was added to http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#address.
7. Signature Profiler (enables enhanced signature functions in Mail, HTML and image insertion) was added to the Added Functionality Section.
8. Mailsmith to Mail.app export script (a smarter way to get your emails out of Mailsmith into Mail) was added to the Switching section.
9. Portable Mail.app (a version of Mail that will run from a removable drive, flash drive or iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. Mailing List Burster (an applescript that splits mailing list digests up into individual messages) was added to the Added Functionality section.
11. rooSwitch (separate profiles for settings in Mail, Safari and other iApps) was added to the Added Functionality section.

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It operates on the same principle as the QuickFile extension for Thunderbird and (for old-timers) the ‘s’ keystroke in Pine (and maybe mutt too, unless memory fails me).

All you need to do is select the message to be filed. Press ⌘-9 or select “Move with MsgFiler” from the Message menu, and a dialog appears into which you start typing the name of the mailboxes while it matches what you type:

The down-arrow key selects the match and the message has gone, filed neatly away.

Alex King (WordPress developer and more ) raves about it. He says it’s

an absolute must have add-on for Mail.app users that file messages. Trust me, this puppy will save you serious time every day. Go download it now, then come back here and read more of the back story.

I’m in two minds.

Whether or not this is useful for you will depend on your workflow. Mail Act-on rules for filing can be executed with a single keystroke. They are much faster than this. But I have pretty much abandoned folders. “One archive to kill them all and let Spotlight (and MailTags) sort ‘em out” is now my motto. Mail Act-on is the faster filing solution for people like me.

Still, some people like folders. I had an email from a Hawk Wings reader just the other day asking how to file things quickly into his more than 1,000 folders. This may be the plugin for him.

MsgFiler is shareware (USD 8 for a limited time, normally 12) and is available from the developer’s web site .

Bonus historical appendix

The phrase “Kill them all and let God sort ‘em out” has its origins in the Crusades.

During the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 CE against the Cathar heresy in Southern France, the forces of mainstream Catholicism were besieging the city of Beziers, defended by Cathar heretics. Finally they breached the walls of the city and prepared to storm it.

The commander of the crusade, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, pointed out that not everybody in the city was a heretic, some of them were good Catholics, so how should they treat the inhabitants when they captured the city?

A monk who was actually present at the siege recorded the answer of the Papal Legate to the Crusaders and Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud-Amaury, as Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet (“Kill them all. God will know his own.” ) The Crusaders followed his advice.

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Because Mail Act-on doesn’t work in Thunderbird and the available quick-filing extensions like Nostagly aren’t quite as slick, I find myself doing much more dragging and dropping than I do in Mail.app.

A neat little tweak from Horst Gutmann makes it all easier by creating a bigger mailbox list and, hence, larger targets on which to drop the emails.

His tip changes the look of the mailbox list from this to this:

(Or, if you are not making a screenshot to demonstrate the difference, something in the middle perhaps).

You will need to add some text to your userChrome.css file, which you will find on your ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/chrome/ folder.

Open it up in your text editor of choice and add the following code:

(You might want to change the pixel size to something slightly more modest).

Save. Close. Open up Thunderbird and enjoy bigger targets and a list that is easier to read. thunderbird, mailboxes list, hack, productivity, drag and drop, filing, tips, userChrome.cssSimilar Posts:

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He frames it all within the Getting Things Done method of task management, but even if you are not a devotee, you will benefit from the extensive screenshots and the clear way in which the tutorial is designed.

Although he tried using the principles of Feng Shui to manage his email with some success in the past,

by using a couple of simple techniques and some cool software, you can use a less new-agey means to simplify your message stream and get back to work…. The goal is to make the act of archiving a one step process. A big part of getting control of your inbox is to be able to triage and filter information quickly. If if takes you more than a second to store a message, then you are taking too long.

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The addition of to-do’s and notes to Mail may indicate that Apple has some useful ideas for enhancing a “non-glamourous” application like Mail beyond just beautiful eye candy.

But his ambitions for Mail don’t stop there. He would like to see the development of “Folder action”-like workflows through AppleScript and Automator. Some of this is already here, he notes, with Mail Act-on and other plugins. Nonetheless,

I’d love to see the equivalent to the Finder’s Folder Actions for every mailbox in Mail, multiple varieties for core functionality like ‘Reply’…, message threading across mailboxes, automatic filing of messages based on those threads, etc…
…Adding workflows which average users could create and edit, and which would advance automated email handling in ways that makes even die-hard productivity geeks smile, could make Apple Mail stand out from the crowd for more than just its good-looking UI.

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Paulo’s AttachmentRemember will catch messages to which you have forgotten to add attachments just like James Eagan’s missing attachments plugin.

Quick file by Paul Tomlin gives filing a tremendous speed boost over the “old drag ‘n’ drop”.

Select a message, hit a user-customizable hotkey (⌃Q works for me), and a dialog appears. Start to type and it offers a list of matching mailboxes that you can navigate through using the arrow keys. It’s quick.

Lastly, Paulo’s ExternalTemplateLoader brings MailTemplate to Thunderbird. It loads an external HTML file as the template for a message or a reply.thunderbird, extensions, filing, templates, attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

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