Nick Flood posts a problem in the user forums at HEXUS:

I stupidly deleted mail.app and I now need it. I can’t find the download anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone help me out?

Once upon a time, you had to get hold of Pacifist , a neat little app that extracts applications from packages, disk images and archives.

You could use it to navigate through your original OS X discs to find Mail.app, extract and install it.

But now (and not everyone knows this) there is an easier way.

Tiger allows for the “custom installation” of individual apps without the need for third-party helpers.

Just insert your installation disks and follow the instructions in this Apple technote, “Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4″ :

This custom reinstall option can also be used with Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes and Safari.

Of course, sometimes Mail.app is so buggered up with hacks, scripts, plugins and add-ons that you may want to delete it and re-install on purpose.

An earlier Hawk Wings post (see “The Final Solution: Reinstalling Mail.app“) covers the steps to do that successfully.

Related posts

• Mail to go: Portable Mail and Address Book
• rooSwitch Lite: Multiple profiles for Mail and other iApps
• Leopard Mail, “like Entourage (but better)”
• A cheeky set of iApp replacement icons
• Zimbra iSync beta released

Freeverse, the company which makes the iChat transcript manager for Mail.app Chatalog also make a clever little chess app that integrates with Mail, Address Book, iSight and more for the full iApp chess experience.

The game interface is striking.

It presents the two players hovering over a board which comes with “fantasy” and “traditional” pieces:

If you choose the “play by email” option (solo and network play are also available), it sends each move and any comment to a Mail.app message.

Your opponent clicks on the attachment and his or her copy of Big Bang Chess opens to show the new move and to allow the counter move.

The email keeps a reference of all comments through the game:

(Playing with yourself, while fairly common in the blogosphere, makes for a less than riveting game.)

Address Book, iChat and iSight integration offer further ways of enhancing the traditional play-by-email exchange.

Freeverse’s Big Bang Chess is part of a games package that also includes Checkers (a.k.a. Drafts), Reversi, Backgammon and Tic-Tac-Toe (a.k.a. Noughts and Crosses).

The Big Bang Board Games Suite costs USD 24.95. A demo is available from the Freeverse web site.

Related posts

• What to do after deleting Mail.app by mistake
• Mail to go: Portable Mail and Address Book
• Leopard Mail, “like Entourage (but better)”
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• Weekly Update

Carlo Gandolfi has developed a way to run Mail and Address Book on a memstick or USB stick, iPod or external drive.

It works as a shell script which opens the local copy of Mail using preferences stored in the external application bundle. The Portable Address Book works in the same way.

If you have a USB stick big enough, you can also store your Mail folder, com.apple.mail.plist and caches on it.

This means that take your Mail and contacts with you and get working on any Mac that has local copies of Mail and Address Book installed.

And there’s more….

However, Portable Safari, Portable Mail, Portable iCal, Portable Address Book and Portable iChat require a USD .99 donation before you can download them. Others like Portable Adium, Portable AbiWord and more are free. See the details and the scripts that makes it work on osxportableapps Sourceforge page .

The Free Open Source Mac User Group has made even more applications portable. Their stuff is free.

Related posts

• What to do after deleting Mail.app by mistake
• rooSwitch Lite: Multiple profiles for Mail and other iApps
• Leopard Mail, “like Entourage (but better)”
• Zimbra iSync beta released
• Weekly Update

A poster on macOSXHints has posted a tip to reduce the long delays in producing a reply window that sometimes occur in Mail.

He suggests that it caused by settings in the Keychain and provides a work-around to fix it.

I had this problem earlier in the year. In my case, it wasn’t caused by Keychain settings, but by my .Mac account.

I won’t repeat it all here, but you can read the whole saga in “Apple Mail phones home too” where you will also find the fix.

In short, Mail was trying to connect through port 80 to verify my iChat certificate. My work firewall blocks port 80. Hence the delay.

Interesting that Mail phones home in an unannounced but benign way, don’t you think?

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• Use your iChat certificate to sign Mail.app emails
• Rui Carmo spanks .Mac
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It’s the season to sacrifice all discretion and fact-checking reserve to the excitement of unrestrained rumour-mongering.

Jason O’Grady at Powerpage helps the process along with a list of “leaked” 10.5 features , which may or may nor be true, but are interesting to read either way.

He offers details of Spotlight 2.0, Dashboard 2.0, Safari 3.0, iChat 4.0, Automator 2.0, QuickTime 7.2, Mail 3.0, iCal 3.0, Address Book 5.0.

For Mail, his source suggests:

- New server protocols
- Widescreen version
- Different views, drop down
- Gmail-like thread system
- Ability to send proper HTML email
- Able to import pages documents as email
- iChat integration and new collaboration integration
- iCal calendar integration

Who knows?

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For the third time in as many weeks, someone whose opinion is worth listening to has given .Mac a proper spanking.

At Tao of Mac, Rui Carmo takes the hatchet to Apple’s online service, and he doesn’t leave much standing after he is finished going through its features one-by-one.

Like previous recent critics (first wave and second wave), Rui is bewildered both by .Mac’s poor value for money and its lack of innovation:

My main point is that .Mac isn’t the benefit it’s touted to be, and that I can come up with a number of enhancements and added features that would make it worthwhile for me to keep my .Mac subscription and push Apple’s online services ahead of the pack where it regards mobility.

It’s not satisfying the geeky end of the Mac user market. It’s not doing too well at the other end either:

On the other hand, if Apple thinks their target market for .Mac is the I-don’t-want-to-understand-computers folk, they may be falling quite short of the mark - because it doesn’t work consistently right even for those people (if you’ve never had issues with .Mac, you’re very lucky).

Rui’s writing is dense and value-packed. I sometimes come away with my head spinning but I’m always glad I took the trouble. Try it yourself.

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