During my five months off, some nice new alternative mail stamp icons have appeared.

As everyone knows, changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy, and fun.

First up, seven icons from the Simpsons TV show (Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, Ruprecht, Bobo and a “Simpsonised” Scully):

You can get them from deviantART where westendgirl1984 posted them.

Other nice new icons include a collection of Super Mario Brother icons , a beautifully-made First Class UK postage stamp and a collection of mail stamp icons from the movie Ratatouille

Some of them are image files that need to be run through a converter like img2icns and some are icns files but need to be run through icon.cx’s icns2icon app in order for Finder to recognise them as icons.

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now contains 467 mail stamp icons (assuming all the links still work).mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, charlie brown, linus, snoopy, peanuts, woodstock

In the past few days, my macOSXHints RSS feed has churned out an astonished number of interesting tips for iCal, Address Book and Mail.app.

Not all of them are equally useful or productivity-boosting, but all of them are interesting, if only because there are sometimes better ways to get these things done.

1. Use Quickview for Mail.app attachments

One tip explains that highlighting an attachment in a Mail message and pressing the spacebar opens Quickview.

Not much more useful than using the Quickview button next to the “Save” button under the headers perhaps, but in the comments, another poster points out that pressing ⌘-Y when viewing a message opens all the message’s attachments in a single Quickview window, with arrows to move from one to the next.

2. Adding notes and to-dos to individual emails

Another post details a way to add notes to an individual email using Leopard Mail’s to-do feature. This is a “hack” for Leopard Mail’s inability to attach notes to individual emails.

I hardly need to tell regular Hawk Wings readers that there is a more excellent way .

3. Apply filters to Address Book contact pictures

This was news to me. If you click the “swirly cube” button next to the camera button in Address Book’s contact image editor, you are rewarded with 35 different filters that you can apply to the picture.

In effect, this brings Photobooth (my kids’ favourite Mac app) to all your Address Book contacts. There is a lot of fun to be had here, especially with the photos of contacts that you don’t much care for.

4. Use Drag ‘n’ Drop to replace icons in an item’s Inspector pane

From time to time I like to chance the icon of my Mail.app. After all there are more than 450 options and changing the icon under Tiger was easy.

Now it is even easier. A macOSXHints tip explains how to change an icon not by opening two Inspectors and cutting and pasting between the icon field in each, but simply by dragging and dropping an icon into the icon field of the target app’s Inspector. That’s much quicker.

5. Unlearn words you learnt by mistake

Mac OS X’s spell checker is a wonderful thing, surpassed only by Spell Checker X, now in the process of private Leopard-friendly beta testing and soon to reappear.

But is is possible to learn a word too quickly, a tipster on macOSXHints points out , adding a misspelt word to your dictionary which the spell checker will never again pick up. Now unlearning it is as simple as right-clicking (or “Command-clicking” in the old language) on the offending word and selecting “Unlearn Spelling” from the contextual menu.mail.app, apple mail, address book, tips, macosxhints, icons, spell checking, contacts, mailtags, notes, to-dos, productivity

Iconical is a stand-alone app that keeps iCal’s Dock icon up-to-date, whether it is open or not. An updated version, released today, brings new features including one for Leopard users.

Leopard users now enjoy an iCal Dock icon that keeps the correct date even when it is closed (did you notice?), but some people are still using Tiger, I suppose. For them, iconical offers several options in its preferences for keeping iCal’s icon current and a choice of colours:

You can set the Dock to refresh, chose whether iCal should open when the icon is updated or not, and now with the new release, schedule when iconical should run.

It is fun to have an ical icon that is green or blue, it is actually useful to be able to find out what day it is by looking in the Dock instead of moving the mouse to click on the time display in the Menubar.

Leopard users are not left out of the party.

The new release gives Leopard users the option to chance the colour of the icon. A smaller preference pane appears with the choice of red, blue or green. You can see the effect in these before and after shots:

iconical is donation-ware. You can read about it on the developer’s web site , but you will need to download it from MacUpdate or VersionTracker .ical, not apple mail, not mail.app, icons, productivity, dock

Hawk Wings reader René Boekhorst sent me a nice collection of mail stamp style icons featuring the characters from the Peanuts.

They are not tilted at 11.7 degrees (more or less) like other Mail.app icons, but they are still sweet.

All your best friends are there — Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder and Lucy. Even people I can’t recall at all get an icon (who is Marcie?).

Here they all are:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

Get them from Pixel Girl’s web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now breaks through the 450+ mail stamp icon barrier.mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, charlie brown, linus, snoopy, peanuts, woodstock

Adam Nohejl at Lokiware has updated his plugin which manages the way Apple Mail displays attachments.

As well as redesigning the plugin so that offers better control of how attachments are handled, he has also tweaked it for Leopard.

Mail Attachment Iconizer 2.0 offers several improvements over Mail.app’s native attachment handling. It offers particular advantages for people who often receive large PDF or PostScript files:

Using the new Preference Pane in Mail’s Preferences, you can determine exactly how attachments will behave. For example, you could choose to see PDFs inline, but Bitmap images as icons, or vice-versa:

You can also opt to set the content so that the recipient of your email sees it in the way you want.

Mail Attachment Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99, discounts for owners of MAI 1.0) and is available from Adam’s web site attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, pdf, icons, productivity

The busy beavers at deviantART have been hard at it.

In the last month or so over 110 new mail stamp icons have appeared, covering everything from celebrities to musicians such as Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, ten rappers I’ve never heard of and Iron Maiden. Half-Life, Lost and the Citadel also get a look in.

Descriptions, a link and a sample of the contents in each set follow. (Hint: Read to the end if you are new to Hawk Wings for installation instructions.)

deviantART user hellhound has created three sets of replacement mail stamp icons.

The first set is a block buster, offering forty icons, including Jessica Alba, someone called Ambrosio, Eminem, three Elvis icons, Half-Life icons, Johnny Cash, Keira Knightly, Maggie Grace, Ray Charles and lots and lots of Scarlett Johansson:

The second set contains ten pieces of Iron Maiden artwork (album covers?):

His third set features thirty assorted celebrities — among them three Bob Dylan icons, Keeley, Lohan and Aguilera et al, two Veronicas icons and, of course, lots more Scarlett Johannson:

Another deviantART user karnakhan offers twenty more celebrities , five variations on each of four images, two of Elisha Cuthbert and two of Scarlett Johansson (who is going very well in the 2007 Mail stamp icon stakes):

Lastly, TheEnvyProject offers up ten rappers in two sets.

I’m jiggy wid it, but I don’t knows their names well enough to type them out. I think my younger brother may once have liked Tupac:

Some of these are PNG or ICO image files not ICNS icons. You will need to convert them using a tool like the excellent and free img2icns utility.

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which gets quite a boost out of this post and now contains 444 different icons.mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, jessica alba, scarlett johansson, bob dylan, elvis presley, halflife, rap artists, iron maiden

Having seen the recent post on UK and USA Mail Stamp icons, Jesse Schooff emails to share a Mail stamp icon for Canada.

He writes:

Antony Ellam’s USA and UK stamps made me envious, so I made a shiny new mail icon for myself using one of our nice Canadian stamps. As per Antony’s convention, the postmark has been changed to Markham, Ontario, where Apple Canada is located. It looks very nice in my dock so I figured I’d share it.

You can download the icon from Hawk Wings.

There is also a Canadian stamp in the “Flags of the World” Mail stamp collection.

As I posted long ago, every Mail user needs to feel grateful towards Canada.

Due to some bizarre operation of Chaos Theory (Wikipedia ), people steeped in maple syrup, lacrosse, mounted policemen, French, the Barenaked Ladies and beaver tails are particularly good at producing top quality Mail.app plugins.

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy.

I’ve added it to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which now contains 332 different icons. With glowing hearts we see thee rise.mail.app, apple mail, icons, dock icon, hack, tips, UK, Royal Mail, USA, stars and stripes