A poster on macOSXHints has written an AppleScript that allows you to control your Mac remotely, performing a variety of tasks that you can trigger using an email in Mail.app.

Unable to connect to his Mac at home via VNC or SSH due to a firewall, he developed a script. When added to a rule in Mail.app, it is triggered by keywords in an email that send to your Mac at home.

The script can get a file to post back to you, launch an application, perform a shell script or save an attachment to a certain location.

If you are not worried about the security implications of this, you can also check out two other apps, Commander and RCMail, which offer the same “remote control” functions via Mail.app and AppleScript.applescript, remote control, remote access, rules, mail.app, apple mail, helpful apps, plugins

MailAnnounce is an AppleScript that announces the sender and subject of new emails.

Damon Parker has updated the script so that it now skips read messages more reliably and is smarter about dealing with “Re:”.

It doesn’t run on Intel Macs.

You can download the updated version from his site applescript, notification, plugins, helpful apps, spoken announcement, mail.app, apple mail

When last I looked in January, Snail Mail, an app that prints beautiful envelopes from your Address Book contacts, was at version 0.6.7.

Now suddenly it’s at 1.4! In the meantime, it has got smarter about printing Home or Work addresses by default and the current profile correctly remembers the settings you last used each time you open it.

Several printing bugs have been ironed out and other minor improvements implemented.

The finished product looks as good as ever:

Snail Mail is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, printing, contacts, envelopes, labels, plugins, helpful apps

Because backing things up is tedious and repetitive, it’s easy to convince yourself that they are not so very important.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a bigger hit to your productivity than losing all your emails, Address Book and iCal data without having a good backup. (If needed, supplement your imagination with this horror story and this one .)

BackityMac is a new utility that makes backing up all your essential data a simple matter of a few clicks. It offers “pre-sets” for Mail.app data, iCal, Address Book and more:

Check the boxes you want, click “backup”. Instead of browsing around for the things that constitute a good backup of Mail (for example), the app does the hard work for you, and delivers it all freshly pressed into a new disk image.

In the event of a disaster, it also offers the option of restoring your data from one of these disk images, again a process of a few mouse clicks. Clever!

As a bonus, a second pane lists some maintenance tasks (and helpful notes on what each one is) that BackityMac can perform:

BackityMac is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .backup, disaster prevention, apple mail, mail.app, ical, address book, helpful apps

Sbook5 is a smarter alternative to Mac OS X’s native Address Book.

Developed by Simson Garfinkel of MIT, it is faster, more flexible and smarter than Address Book.

The free-form database that powers it allows for any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs and URLs per card which it then parses and sorts.

It presents the ordered information in a contact pane with icons beside each field that launch messages, format addresses for printing on envelopes, load URLs and dial phone numbers:

It also outsmarts Address Book at almost every turn.

SBook5 can automatically tell the difference between an entry that represents a person and one that represents a corporation, and sort the card accordingly.

Adding a card is amazing. If you cut and paste a signature from an email into a blank new card, SBook5 automatically parses the information and determines what’s a postal address, what’s an email address or a phone number.

No need for the tedious tabbing through fields that adding an entry in Address Book entails.

It syncs two ways with Address Book and is really fast. It look less than ten seconds to import and parse the 480 entries in my Address Book.

You can also use it as a de facto contact creator for Address Book. Use the power of SBook5 to parse the information for a contact, and then select the app’s “Push Entry to Apple Address Book” option to create a corresponding card in Address Book.

SBook5 is endlessly customizable and tweakable. You can read more about it and download the app (freeware?) at the developer’s web site .

But be careful; after you use it, you will never look at Address Book so happily again. Why doesn’t it have these features and this kind of flexibility?

[Thanks, Gibbons]Address Book, sbook5, contacts, vcards, productivity, helpful apps

CuteClips is a small app that stores the last twelve entries in your clipboard.

It can store up images, URLs, text or files in a nice smoked glass dialog, complete with preview and is activated by a hotkey

A new version, released today, offers a smart improvement to the way you can select the clippings. In the past, you has to tab, or use the arrow keys or mouse to select the clip you wanted.

Now, hitting Control reveals the numbering of the clips, and hitting the corresponding Function key paste that entry in:

There are other utilities that do that same thing, notably CopyPaste, which offers far richer features but is also far more expensive (USD 30). Quicksilver can do this too, but lacks the facility to make a clipping sticky and thus available forever (it doesn’t actually lack this — see Henning’s remarks in the comments).

CuteClips does the job for me, making my work in Mail.app and elsewhere faster and more efficient.

It costs only 5 euros (USD 6) and is available from the developer’s web site .clipboard, clippings, productivity, helpful apps, quicksilver, cute clips, copypaste

Emailchemy is an app that converts mailboxes from an astonishing number of current and not-so-current email clients into the RFC-2822 (“mbox”) format.

This helps in moving from one client to another and with retrieving emails from ancient email clients that might otherwise be lost.

Today’s update adds some improvements to the way it handles emails from Outlook Express 5 for Mac and QuickMail Pro. The folder hierarchy in both is now preserved.

It also improves the CSV export option and includes bugfixes for handling Entourage and Emailer 2 folders.

Emailchemy is shareware (USD 25) and is available from the developer’s web site .emailchemy, mailboxes, mbox, conversion, email, RFC-2822, helpful apps