Brian Fling has written up a terrific post on using MailTags and Mail Act-on to stay on top of your email.

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.

Ten steps or less.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, GTD, MailTags, Mail Act-on, plugins, tips, inbox, filing, triaging

Jochen Wolters at MacDevCenter likes the new to-do and notes features in Leopard Mail. He thinks that

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.

mail.app, apple mail, automator, applescript, filing, workflow, productivity, rules, folder actions

Extensions now exist which offer Thunderbird users some of the rich extra functions provided by Mail.app plugins. Paolo Koasmos has written a collection of excellent extensions and Paul Tomlin’s Quick File gets close to the filing magic offered by Mail Act-on.

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

If you use Thunderbird and are interested in “productivity” or just working your email smarter and more efficiently, you will like Quick File.

It is a Thunderbird extension that quickly files messages into the folder of your choice, the closest thing that I have seen to Mail Act-on for Thunderbird.

The extension’s preferences allow to set a user-defined hotkey to activate its filing window:

The developer suggests Control-Q for Mac users and that does work.

If you have selected a message and hit the hotkey, Quick File pops up a filing window:

Type in the first few letters of the folder into which you want to file the message, and it lists the matches. You can keep typing until there is only one left, or navigate through the options with the arrow keys. Hit return, and it’s filed.

You can get the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons site .thunderbird, productivity, filing, messages, extensions

Everyone’s talking about it, so why not join in? Mail Act-on is everyone’s plug-in of the moment. Reviews on 43 Folders, MacOSXHints, About.com, Amit Gupta’s Blog and MacWorld rave about the time it saves and the neatness it brings to your inbox.

Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do – moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.

Some reviewers recommend combining its use with a “Respond-Action-Hold-Waiting-Archive” schema of folders for sorting mail and getting über-efficient. That’s not for me. I soon forget about the emails I moved into the Action folder, or worry about which of the folders a particular email should be in. But even without this extra step, my inbox is smaller and I deal with things faster.

Mail Act-on is free, although the creator, Scott Morrison, accepts donations. You can download it from his web site.mail act-on, scott morrison, filing, email, rules, plugin, keyboard shortcut, mail.app, apple mail