Hawk Wings » folders

Gmail IMAP, Mail.app and iPhone Mail in harmony

Tim Gaden — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:39:53 +0000

Hmmm…. Late to the party on this one, but still worth posting.

Derek Punsalan has posted a comprehensive guide to getting Gmail’s new IMAP service, Apple Mail and the iPhone’s Mail.app working together in perfect harmony.

He explains how to mail the special folders in Mail.app (Sent, Draft, Trash) to the correct ones in your Gmail account, and then how to match them in the Gmail account on your iPhone.

He also provides a summary of several clever tips that were left in the 212 comments to the post, including how to use Gmail without all the Gmail folder hierarchy, and how Mail.app flags and Gmail stars are the same thing.

Curiously, he doesn’t mention a tip for email hoarders. If you like to keep everything, select Gmail’s all mail folder and under Mail.app’s Mailbox > Use this mailbox for… menu option, select Trash.

Then your delete key becomes a quick archive shortcut.

Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a bad idea — See an earlier Hawk Wings post on Why the delete key is your best friend.

[Via just about everyone]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, imap, iphone, folders, tipsSimilar Posts:

Script to archive mail.app messages by month

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:59:06 +0000

Not everyone is a fan of the new-fangled “tag ‘em, archive ‘em and let Spotlight sort ‘em out” school of email storage, described in past Hawk Wings posts like “Use MailTags and kiss your folders goodbye” and “Mail.app without folders (or tears)” (which points to some interesting research on why people can’t give up their folders).

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:

Five tutorials on using Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:28:36 +0000

The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.mail.app, apple mail, rules, productivity, mail act-on, tutorial, tips, sorting, folders, imapSimilar Posts:

A mendable Mail.app IMAP mailbox mess

Tim Gaden — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:42:48 +0000

Jon at WizardIsHungry is an unhappy Mail user.

He has three accounts, a Gmail account and two IMAP ones, but the mailboxes won’t behave the way he wants them to (as you can see on the right).

It’s a mess. One IMAP account is displaying its folders under the Account’s Inbox; the other “breaks them out” under a globe further down the Mailbox Viewer.

As if that’s not bad enough, Mail.app is also eating his draft and sent messages instead of storing them in one of his two (!) Sent folders.

Abstruse error messages in the Console only add insult to injury.

Enough’s enough. It’s good-bye to Mail.app as far as Jon is concerned:

So I guess Iâ€™ll be migrating to Thunderbird once I get a free couple days to export all my mail and regenerate my IMAP mailbox. If anyone has any hints about migration or using Thunderbird, Iâ€™d like to hear them.

Luckily for him, Derik DeLong from MacUser posted all the answers in a comment to Jon’s post.

Some of his problems can be fixed by setting the right IMAP path prefix for his email provider (More on this in a post and comments on Joseph Scott’s blog).

The rest can be fixed by using the Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For… menu option to set the folders that Mail uses for its Draft, Sent, Trash and Junk mailboxes (See Apple’s technote on this for more).mail.app, apple mail, IMAP, mailboxes, folders, special folders, IMAP path prefix, unhappy user, dog’s breakfastSimilar Posts:

IMAPCheck: Plugin for server-side mailboxes

Tim Gaden — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:42:21 +0000

Daniel Bingham has written a plugin that fixes a particular problem with Mail.app’s IMAP support.

IMAPCheck corrects Mail.app’s habit of not seeing email that has been moved into IMAP subfolders by server-side rules until you actually open the subfolder.

Instead, it forces Mail to do a full sync every time, which will increase the traffic between your IMAP server and your Mac, but will also pick up emails that you might not otherwise see.

This plugin differs from IMAP-IDLE, a plugin that creates support in Mail for IMAP’s IDLE feature.

With IMAP-IDLE installed, Mail knows about email arriving in your inbox right away. IMAPCheck lets you know about email that has arrived and been moved into another IMAP folder.

IMAPCheck comes with one limitation:

It still does not enable rules support on IMAP accounts. This bundle WILL allow Mail.app to see the new email, but it still doesn’t process rules in those folders. I looked briefly into enabling rules on these folders, but it seems to be something built directly into POP Account support.

I don’t have any server-side rules myself, but those who do will be glad of this new option.

It’s donation-ware and you can get it from Daniel’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, imap, server side, rules, mailboxes, folders, pluginsSimilar Posts:

MsgFiler: Quick filing plugin for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:57:47 +0000

Adam Tow has produced a plugin for Mail.app that offers an option for quickly filing messages.

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 âŒ˜-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.

Wait a minute… Is this history or current affairs?mail.app, apple mail, plugins, filing, folders, productivity, add-onsSimilar Posts:

Mail.app’s blue and white folders explained

Tim Gaden — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:44:53 +0000

Rob Griffiths (MacWorld, macOSXHints) explains the difference between white and blue folders in Mail.app in a post at MacWorld.

In a nutshell, blue folders are mailboxes and white ones are not:

The two green-highlighted entries correspond to the two white folders in the leftmost image. Notice that neither folder has the .mbox extension. The blue folders, on the other hand, do have the extension, and can be used to store both messages and foldersâ€”they are true mailbox folders.

Rob goes on to suggest why you might want white folders and how to create them the easy way and the hard way.

[Thanks, Chin]mail.app, apple mail, tips, folders, mailboxes. blue, whiteSimilar Posts:

Script to export email from Mailsmith

Tim Gaden — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 12:07:34 +0000

I was surprised to discover an email that I received a few days ago was written in Mailsmith, so someone is still using it. (In fact, he is a member of the Mac blogging nobility, where Mailsmith retains strong appeal, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised).

If you are using Mailsmith and thinking about a move to Mail.app (or anywhere else), David Hamilton has written a script that exports emails in a smarter way than the default that comes with Mailsmith itself.

He has tweaked it so that it will preserve your folder hierarchy in Mailsmith which the default script flattens.

Of course, “no guarantees, representations, or warrantees by the author or anyone else”. mail.app, apple mail, mailsmith, exporting, applescript, folders, switchingSimilar Posts:

Six tricks to get your email organised

Tim Gaden — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 12:16:49 +0000

Glenn Wolsey has listed six hot tips for organising your email life to make it more efficient and productive.

Some of them will be familiar to Hawk Wings readers like how the delete key is your best friend and reducing the frequency of your email checks.

Others are more controversial – tagging or folders or a mixed marriage? Glenn is a folders man.

Still, whatever your personal faith position on these matters, reading how someone else does it often leads to new insights into how to do it better yourself. For instance, check out Glenn’s three folder strategy. Interesting.

[Via 43 Folders . Where else?] productivity, tips, mail.app, apple mail, smart folders, folders, inboxSimilar Posts:

Use MailTags and kiss your folders goodbye

Tim Gaden — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:48:42 +0000

David Emery provides a rave review of how Spotlight and MailTags, the prince of plugins, help him to be more productive at the office.

Everyone else in the office files their emails. Not David:

In a work environment I can just about understand the need for filing things in folders; but I think this behaviour stems from how older email programs worked. With Mail.app on Mac OS X 10.4 the search is brilliant…. Hence, whenever I want to find a specific email I just search for it; which takes about the same time I imagine opening a folder and scanning its contents for the correct email would take.

He gets extra search precision and power by using MailTags :

Using this plugin, I tag every email that comes in with a set of tags that will help when I come so search for something. So, for example, if I get an email about a Thom Yorke website, Iâ€™ll tag it with “Thom Yorke” and “XL” (the [recording] label). This also exposes another weakness with the traditional filing model â€“ you canâ€™t have something in two folders at once.

All this tagging, though, only helps to add some context to an email that might not happen to mention its topic â€“ a notes panel would do the trick as well, if it was searchable.

Regular Hawk Wings readers will remember recent research on how hard it is for people to give up folders for their email. email, folders, tags, mailtags, mail.app,apple mail, productivity, pluginsSimilar Posts: