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, switching

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, inbox

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, I’ll tag it with “Thom Yorke” and “XL” (the [recording] label). This also exposes another weakness with the traditional filing model – you can’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 – 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, plugins

CNXN has published a detailed tutorial on using Outlook without folders. It aims to overcome the drawbacks of folders — they obscure as well as organise, and filing things into them can take a lot of time.

Folders, it argues, are to blame for the following time-wasting and stress-inducing situations:

• This message relates to “Training” and “Expenses”…… better put a copy in each folder.
• I found the message but can’t remember my response? Now I have to search my sent messages!
• Let’s see, what’s a good folder name….. hmmmm….
• *&%$# it! Throw it in “To Be Filed” and file it later. (mental note: stay late on Friday, again)
• My folder list is HUGE! This is tougher to navigate than the emails!!
• Can’t find it – quicker to rewrite it.
• Folders, within folders, within folders……..

The tutorial is based on a white paper (PDF ) from the Information School at the University of Washington.

Researchers at UW interviewed 14 people (most of them UW academics) about how they used folders for organisation and whether improving Desktop search utilities could convince them to live without folders.

In the main, the answer is no. Participants valued folders for security (don’t trust searches), for control (ensuring files are all in one place) and “understandability” (folders indicate the relationships between things).

Above all the researchers are convinced that hierachies (i.e. your Mail folders) have basic limitations. In a hierarchy each information item can only belong in one place, although it may have information relationships with many other items elsewhere in the hiararchy. More flexible or nuanced models of organisation (tagging, metadata) are required, they argue.

Hence a long tutorial on a folder-less Outlook, using colour and sorting instead for organisation.

A folder-less Mail.app is also easy to create. Mail Act-on can supplement Mail’s in-built rules feature by allowing to you to colour emails on the fly. MailTags offers the easy tagging of emails with metadata, which can form the raw data for Smart Folders or searches within Mail.mail.app, apple mail, Outlook, folders, organisation, information retrieval, productivity, email, GTD, Getting things done

A post on the The Rumbling Edge, Mozilla’s site for cutting-edge developments, lists the features and improvements that will appear in Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1.0, which has not yet been released.

Top of the list are custom Folder Pane Views for things like favorites, unread and recently used email. You will also be able to tag messages, and open multiple messages in individual tabs.

The new version will offer built-in notification of new email, which may look something like this:

You will be able to get pop-up summaries of the contents in folders.

Security will be enhanced with an improved Bayesian algorithm and better protection from Phishing.

Lastly, it will offer support for “find as you type” filtering.

The post lists all the many more fixes and improvements in detail, including twelve Mac-specific issues.

I see nothing to tempt me away from Mail.app, but it is interesting to see how Thunderbird is developing.email, thunderbird 2.0, mozilla, new features, notification, folders,

MacBiff is a “biff” program that sits in the menubar and polls multiple IMAP accounts for new mail.

Unlike many notification utilities, though, it takes full advantage of the functions and flexibility of IMAP servers and folders.

If you are looking for a powerful and flexible mail-check utility for your IMAP accounts that also works with Growl, you will want to read the rest of the review and see the screenshots after the jump.

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More reports of IMAP woes in Mail.app:

1. Alan Gutierrez says that Apple Mail is just “too pitifully” slow when seaching IMAP accounts, even when they are cached locally.
2. Thomas at BSDUNix says that Mail.app sucks — “You can’t subscribe to mailboxes and it’s awful slow with large imap mailboxes.”
3. Although Paul Westbrook notes that Mail handles losing the IMAP connection well, he discovers two other quirks with IMAP in Mail.app — in copying nested IMAP folders and in using accounts that are over-quota.

End result? 66% user-drain to Thunderbird. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, imap, over-quota, subscribing, folders, searching, mailboxes