The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.mail.app, apple mail, rules, productivity, mail act-on, tutorial, tips, sorting, folders, imap

Florian Beer has posted two tips which stop Mail.app syncing Exchange’s public folders.

One of them has been covered on Hawk Wings before, but the other one brings the list of possible work-arounds to four:

1. Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
2. Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
3. Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
4. Lock the local cache. Florian’s second tip explains how to lock your local cache folders so that Exchange can’t sync with them.

Caveat Lector — I have absolutely no experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and no interest in acquiring some. mail.app, apple mail, microsoft, exchange server, imap, public folders, perl, local cache, email

GyazMail, an up-and-coming Cocoa-based email client for Mac Os X, has been updated.

The new version (1.5) brings some other welcome improvements as well as a big feature bump–IMAP support.

Adding support for the IPv6 addresses and the ability to save messages in plain text, RTF and other formats are fine additions to any client, but it’s IMAP support that finally makes GyazMail almost a grown-up email app.

The interface is unapologetically modelled on Mail.app:

There is not much that it cannot do. GyazMail supports multiple accounts, a variety of screen layouts including an “Outlook-style” wide-screen format, message threading, rules and filters, SSL/TLS support, labels, customisable keyboard shortcuts, some AppleScript support and more (see the full feature set on GyazMail’s web site).

Personally, I think Mail.app still holds the edge in at least two ways: the “Unified Inbox” and the ability to extend and customise it through plugins (two of the five reasons to be grateful for Mail.app).

But after fooling around with it for a day, I’m happily prepared to put it ahead of Mail’s two other main rivals, the Behemoth and the Wildebeest’s Butt.

GyazMail is shareware (USD 18), although you can try it for free first in a 40-day demo which is available at the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, entourage, email, imap

Web designer and self-confessed standards fanatic Jeff Croft is not dreaming of a white Christmas. He is dreaming of the best imaginable Mail.app that might come his way in Leopard.

Of course, he is also dreaming of a better Safari, a faster Spotlight and other things that have no place on this blog.

But when he gets around to Mail, iCal and Address Book, he pulls out all the stops:

Better integration of the personal productivity and communication apps. It is, frankly, appalling that iCal, Mail.app, Address Book and iChat know very little about each other in the current Mac OS X environment. I want Google-like recognition of phrases and other natural-language idioms in e-mail. If Matt e-mails me and says, “we need to have the weather page working by noon tomorrow,” Mail.app should prompt me to create a to-do item in iCal with a due date of 12:00pm tomorrow, a summary of “Have weather page working”), with Matt included as an attendee and a link to his Address Book card. If I get an e-mail from Dan that says, “Let’s chat about this tomorrow around 3pm,” I want a pop-up on my screen tomorrow at three that says, “Dan is currently online. Would like to start a video chat?”

I’ve been getting a taste for this greater integration by playing around on Zimbra at work. It cleverly displays a pop-up with your existing appointments when you mouse over text that it has parsed a date. Nice.

Much improved Mail.app. I love the overall UI of Mail.app and I haven’t found anything I like better. But, still, there are several improvements that can be made, especially in terms of performance. Mail.app sucks with large IMAP folders, and I’ve got several of them. Could I break them into smaller folders? Sure. Should I have to? Hell no. Smart Mailboxes, a true gem of Mail.app, are a little underpowered. Compared to iTunes, there just aren’t enough filtering attributes. Many people want a widescreen version of Mail.app, so it seems like a worthy addition, even though I’m not sure it’s something I could get used to personally. And yeah, we could stand to loose the gel-cap icons (although I don’t find them nearly as offensive as some folks do).

(In a spirit of seasonal goodwill towards the Mail Team, I tried to run Mail.app with the lozenge buttons again a week ago. But I… just… couldn’t… bear… it. If you feel the same, help is at hand.)mail.app, apple mail, leopard, ical, address book, ical, zimbra, imap, GTD, Getting things done

Jon at WizardIsHungry is an unhappy Mail user.

He has three accounts, a Gmail account and two IMAP ones, but the mailboxes won’t behave the way he wants them to (as you can see on the right).

It’s a mess. One IMAP account is displaying its folders under the Account’s Inbox; the other “breaks them out” under a globe further down the Mailbox Viewer.

As if that’s not bad enough, Mail.app is also eating his draft and sent messages instead of storing them in one of his two (!) Sent folders.

Abstruse error messages in the Console only add insult to injury.

Enough’s enough. It’s good-bye to Mail.app as far as Jon is concerned:

So I guess I’ll be migrating to Thunderbird once I get a free couple days to export all my mail and regenerate my IMAP mailbox. If anyone has any hints about migration or using Thunderbird, I’d like to hear them.

Luckily for him, Derik DeLong from MacUser posted all the answers in a comment to Jon’s post.

Some of his problems can be fixed by setting the right IMAP path prefix for his email provider (More on this in a post and comments on Joseph Scott’s blog).

The rest can be fixed by using the Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For… menu option to set the folders that Mail uses for its Draft, Sent, Trash and Junk mailboxes (See Apple’s technote on this for more).mail.app, apple mail, IMAP, mailboxes, folders, special folders, IMAP path prefix, unhappy user, dog’s breakfast

Daniel Bingham has written a plugin that fixes a particular problem with Mail.app’s IMAP support.

IMAPCheck corrects Mail.app’s habit of not seeing email that has been moved into IMAP subfolders by server-side rules until you actually open the subfolder.

Instead, it forces Mail to do a full sync every time, which will increase the traffic between your IMAP server and your Mac, but will also pick up emails that you might not otherwise see.

This plugin differs from IMAP-IDLE, a plugin that creates support in Mail for IMAP’s IDLE feature.

With IMAP-IDLE installed, Mail knows about email arriving in your inbox right away. IMAPCheck lets you know about email that has arrived and been moved into another IMAP folder.

IMAPCheck comes with one limitation:

It still does not enable rules support on IMAP accounts. This bundle WILL allow Mail.app to see the new email, but it still doesn’t process rules in those folders. I looked briefly into enabling rules on these folders, but it seems to be something built directly into POP Account support.

I don’t have any server-side rules myself, but those who do will be glad of this new option.

It’s donation-ware and you can get it from Daniel’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, imap, server side, rules, mailboxes, folders, plugins

Michael Tsai has released an update to his tag-smart, open-format PIM app EagleFiler.

Michael could have aimed higher and called it EagleFiler 2.0; with over 110+ new improvements and tweaks, it certainly carries enough newness to warrant the higher number.

Fortunately, I don’t have to type them all out. Michael has provided a complete changelog for the update.

Here are five new features in the app that caught my eye:

1. IMAP support and smarter Mail.app capture. EagleFiler can now IMAP mailboxes and individual email messages from Apple Mail. Nice!
2. Omnivorous, universal importing. You can now import every file known to mankind into EagleFiler. If it doesn’t know how to display it, EagleFiler displays the icon for the file and lets you open it in another app.
3. Tag auto-completion. Tags now auto-complete as you type them, a great feature which saves both time and errors. EagleFiler now also displays an item’s tags in the status bar at the bottom of the window, so what you see them easily and edit or add to them.
4. Quick Editing of web archives. A new “Added Convert For Editing” command quickly converts web archives to RTFD files for editing.
5. Import of MailTags projects as tags. Emails marked with MailTags projects are tagged with those project names when imported into EagleFiler.

That only scratches the surface.

With the new tagging improvements especially, people who are into Getting Things Done (GTD) will find it even easier to adapt the tips in yesterday’s “Getting Things Done with Yojimbo” post to EagleFiler.

I find it hard to place EagleFiler into a hierarchy or scheme with other personal information managers (PIMs). It is more flexible but less polished than Yojimbo, more open but less fully featured than SOHO Notes, less powerful but less bloated than the DEVONthink projects.

Perhaps the best way for you to judge is to test it out yourself.

A demo is available from Michael’s site . If you like it, a licence costs USD 40. mail.app, apple mail, emails, imap, productivity, tagging, information manager, tags, pim