MailTags , the prince of Mail.app plugins, is becoming so wide-spread that it is now a force to reckon with for other developers as well.

Recent updates to two other apps offer better ways to integrate MailTags data.

The latest version of up-and-coming “Getting Things Done” app iGTD imports MailTags tags along with emails when you use the app’s F5 hotkey.

DockStar 2.0.2 (Hawk Wings Review) resolves an issue in showing mail counts for smart mailboxes based on MailTags. Now, you can make a “@followup” smart mailbox based on your keywords and set Dockstar to show the total number of messages in this mailbox as a separate badge on the Mail icon. mail,.app, apple mail, mailtags, tags, integration, getting things done, gtd, productivity, dockstar

Juan Ignacio Leon’s excellent iPhoto2Gmail plugin has been updated and now offers even smarter ways for Gmail users to email photos from iPhoto.

Basically, it adds a pane to iPhoto’s “Export…” dialog:

The updated version offers a Contacts button that pulls down your Gmail contacts so that you pick the recipient(s) from that list.

Other new features include:

- A bugfix for RAW and other non-jpeg files that were not properly renamed when scaled.
- A fix for some situations in which the plugin would try to send message without recipients.
- Re-written code to be Object Oriented and Modular for maintainability.

You can get the revised version from Juan’s web site .iphoto, gmail, photos, webmail, plugin, web 2.0, integration, email

Armin has written a clever little Address Book plugin that quickly finds and lists in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular email address.

After installing it with the instructions on his site, clicking and holding the cursor over an email label in Address Book gives you a “Show Emails from” option.

Click it, and — voila! — the plugin opens an Address search in Mail.app for that email address.

Of course, you can do the same thing manually in Mail.app, but this is much quicker.

And tools that help Address Book and Mail.app to work more closely together without actually mashing them up are welcome.

UPDATE: In order for this script to work you need to have the “Enable access for assistive devices” option checked in the Universal Access Preferences pane of System Preferences. address book, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, automation, productivity, integration, plugins

Earlier this year Torsten Curdt worked out how to get Thunderbird working (sort of) with Address Book.

Robert Coleman thought it might be “interesting to repeat the process with the updated patch and the latest trunk Thunderbird.”

And he has, producing a clear walkthrough of how to do it, complete with the steps and code-snippets he used to compile it.

It still looks pretty complicated to me, although it might be a walk in the park for you.

UPDATE: Or as Stan rightly points out in the comments, you can just grab a Thunderbird 3.0a1 build already compiled with the Address Book patch from Torsten’s site . address book, thunderbird, integration, howto, do it yourself, ai carumba

Today is ‘iCal Day”, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon.

To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:

Widgets

If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.

Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:

Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site .

Menubar utilities

High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).

It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .

Integration with Mail.app

I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .

If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .

Alarms

iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).

Backup

Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.

Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.

Of course, there are plenty more iCal utilities in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List. ical, ical day, widgets, menubar, addons, alarms, backup, integration, mail.app, apple mail

A new public beta of NetNewsWire, the RSS reader, is available from Newsgator, the app’s new home.

It has lots of new features and some tweaks to its interface and performance. Hawk Wings’ readers will be especially interested to hear of its tighter integration with Mail.app.

Rather like Safari, two new commands in the File menu offer options for emailing the contents of the news item and for emailing a link to the news item or page.

The email-contents command requires Apple Mail, although the email link command should work equally well with Thunderbird, Entourage and other email clients.

Nice one, Brent.

[Via TUAW ]netnewswire, mail.app, apple mail, beta, integration, safari

One reason to prefer Mail.app to Thunderbird has been partially overturned.

Peter Van der Beken has finally developed a patch that provides some access to Address Book for Thunderbird.

Thorsten at vafer.org has got the patch working with the latest Thunderbird trunk. He even offers—rashly—to provide compiled copies of Thunderbird with the patch for people who ask.thunderbird, address book, integration, mail.app, apple mail