Hawk Wings reader and graphic designer Sigurður Ármannsson (his blog is in Icelandic and, hence, very mysterious and cool) has whipped up a new header for Hawk Wings.

He was astonished that the old header was so plain. It didn’t take long to explain my level of Photoshop expertise to him.

The new header is obviously much more swanky but still carries through the legacy of the Red-tailed Hawk from Mail’s stamp icon and the font of the old header.

I am quite taken with it. What do you think?

For old time’s sake and by way of comparison:

UPDATE: I have asked Sigurður if he would be kind enough to take on some of the suggestions in the comments. He was, so the image now features the Lucida Grande font of the original and some drop shadow to lift out the text.

Slightly more readers who left comments prefer the new one. More interesting still, Mint tells me that 9,286 individuals visited the site yesterday. Most of them didn’t care either way!

[Thanks, Sigurður!]mail.app, apple mail, header, iceland, photoshop, very kind

Andreas Amann, in a comment on an earlier Hotmail entry, makes the following suggestion:

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I just tested sending a message to my hotmail (?¢‚Ǩ¬ùspam honey pot?¢‚Ǩ¬ù) account and it arrived just fine (well, in the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìJunk?¢‚Ǩ¬ù folder) even with no priority changes.

Since I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t test this myself, here is something to test – my guess is that hotmail is looking for the X-Priority header for some reason – sending messages as ?¢‚Ǩ?ìNormal?¢‚Ǩ¬ù priority does not add this header in Mail (which is smart). However, you can add this header to all your outgoing messages typing the following in the Terminal (with Mail closed):

This will add a X-Priority header to ALL outgoing messages, ?¢‚Ǩ?ì3?¢‚Ǩ¬? represents ?¢‚Ǩ?ìnormal?¢‚Ǩ¬ù.

I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know whether this works (since I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t get messages not to arrive to my account) by my guess is it should – if you normally don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t use priorities you should be fine (I don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know what happens if you set another priority from the UI).

In order to reset this, you would type the following in Terminal:

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I tested this and it does work. The benefits of Andreas’ solution are obvious. Having the X-Priority header set at “3″ is not disruptive in any way to non-Hotmail recipients, and it saves you from having to do anything special like remember to carbon copy or select a high or low priority from a drop-down box for emails that are going to Hotmail users.

[Thanks, Brad!].