Hawk Wings reader Adam sends in this tip for creating a custom keyboard shortcut that adds a hyperlink to an email in Mail.app without the need to go searching through its menu options.

Hawk Wings has covered creating bespoke shortcuts before as well as the virtues of moving around in Mail.app using only the keyboard. Few things do more to speed up your email workflow.

So, you can never post often enough about keyboard shortcuts, and this is a good one.

Adam writes:

In Mail.app I wanted ⌘K to be my shortcut for adding a link in the body of a message. But the command is usually only available via the submenu Link > Add… under the Edit menu. On a whim, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, hit the plus sign and in the box for Menu Title entered “Add…” (no quotes, and using Option-Semicolon for the elipsis). It worked!

If you are a visual learner, this screenshot of the process Adam describes might help too:

Mail.app then kindly adds the new shortcut to your menu, so that you never forget it:

Once you get the taste for it, you won’t want to stop there. Add another to insert a bulleted list (if you go for those):

Of course, both these examples are for Rich Text people. I can’t bring myself to abandon plain text — there’s something noble about it, something efficient, something respectful of the recipient’s settings for displaying text; it’s the way our forefathers did email.

But I recognise that I am a dinosaur in these matters.

Great tip, Adam. Thanks!

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John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has written up a detailed explanation of Leopard Mail’s new message: URL links, which allow you to link to individual email messages from other apps like Yojimbo and iCal.

He describes how the feature works, the various formats that Leopard accepts — message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message:<MESSAGE-ID>, message://<MESSAGE-ID> — and why message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e is the best of the bunch.

As he correctly points out there is no default menu option in Leopard Mail to access this feature. However MailTags users can find it under the Edit menu or use the keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘U to copy the URL to the clipboard (in Mail.app’s default message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format).

John also provides an applescript for copying the message: URL of a selected email to the clipboard in his preferred message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format, which is recognised by any Cocoa-based app using NSTextView.

Read the whole post and get the applescript on Daring Fireball.

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Scott Little has updated his excellent SignatureProfiler plugin for Leopard Mail.

Veteran Hawk Wings readers will remember how many nifty tweaks and new options this plugin brings to Mail.app’s signature feature (see this previous Hawk Wings post if you are not a veteran reader).

The new version adds support for Leopard Mail and removes it for Panther Mail. You can get the update (1.4.4) from Scott’s web site . SignatureProfiler is donation-ware.

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If, for some reason, you don’t use MailTags but like the ability to link to Mail.app messages in other apps, LinkABoo is the app for you.

Carsten Blüm has just released an updated version that now supports IMAP accounts.

That is to say, it works by linking to the locally-cached copy of an IMAP email.

UPDATE: The developer emails to assure me that the links will remain intact even if the local cache has to be rebuilt. So it’s a move-proof, rebuild-proof solution for IMAP users.

You can drop the hyperlinks which the app creates into any app that supports the feature, among them Yojimbo, SOHO Notes and other PIMs, productivty apps like Easy Task Manager, iCal and more.

He has also produced an animated GIF which demonstrates how the hyperlinks work.

The LinkABoo beta is freeware and available from Carsten’s web site .

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A poster on macOSXhints has posted an applescript that will provide a link to Mail.app messages in iCal to-dos and events.

Obviously, the concept is a good one, but in this case, it’s a tip to avoid. The main problem is the link will break as soon as an email is moved. Reindexing Spotlight may also break the link. Links to IMAP messages will break if you have to refresh your local mail cache.

So, all up, not so good.

If your email is IMAP, you are better off waiting for the next MailTags public beta which is plenty robust and creates reliable, move-proof hyperlinks back to your emails. (See more on this in Scott’s comment below).

If you’re a POP person, the next public beta of MailTags will work for you too. Or if you can’t wait, LinkABoo makes solid links for POP messages.

The developer is about to release a new beta of LinkABoo which has support for hyperlinking to IMAP email. I’m playing with it now, and it feels pretty solid.

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Bare Bones has updated Yojimbo, adding support for tagging, hyperlinks, better handling of passwords, improved web archive support and some interface tweaks (see the full changelog here ).

The big ticket item for many will be tagging. And Bare Bones has left no stone unturned in implementing it.

Tags can be entered in the item’s Inspector, directly in the item’s details bar or through the quick input panel. In addition, new bookmarklets for the major Mac browsers allow the option of adding tags at the point of bookmarking or archiving a web page.

You can find the new bookmarklets by searching Yojimbo’s help for “bookmark”.

As one would expect the tags are nice aqua tokens. They auto-complete and Yojimbo even offers you options if your typing matches more than one, as you can see here in a screenshot of tagging via an item’s new look details bar:

Yojimbo lets you find tagged items again by searching for them or by creating “tag collections”, smart folders that match on user-defined tags. It can also display them as a new column in the interface’s main view.

Unfortunately, the tag collections can only match items with “all” the nominated tags. There is no “any” option. Surely that will soon be fixed:

People looking for a more keyboard-orientated way to tag, will be glad to find that two tab-key strokes bring you to the tagging field in an item’s details bar.

The new version also provides for hyperlinking within items. You can add web URLs or links to emails with LinkABoo or (soon) MailTags and add links to files and folder just by dragging them onto the hyperlink dialog:

Lists and Tables are now supported in notes too, which is nice.

Other new features include provision for Yojimbo to use Apple’s Keychain, more details options for how passwords are handled and Command-clicking in web archives to open URLs in the background.

Perhaps I should also mention that Yojimbo users who also use Mail.app will get a lot of mileage out of an applescript that pipes selected emails into Yojimbo. I use this a lot.

Yojimbo costs USD 39 (educational licence USD 29). The full version and a demo are available from Bare Bones’ web site .

UPDATE: Patrick Rhone has some interesting thoughts on the new tags in Yojimbo 1.3 vs. traditional sorting by sub-folders, part of the great “tag in one archive vs. file in folders” debate.

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