The email notification utility Notify has just been updated.

The new release comes with a slew of new features, including keyboard shortcuts, the ability to grab photos from Address Book for its Growl notifications, smarter options for message reading and handling and better support for plain text.

Notify is at the feature-rich “high end” of the spectrum for email notifiers. Like MailCue , it is almost a mini-email client in itself.

It offers built-in support for Gmail and Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace and “ordinary” IMAP accounts:

The interface is minimal and well-crafted, offering options to read, delete or move messages in the menubar drop-down pane:

Buttons across the top recheck the account, launch the message in the webmail client or offer a full preview in Notify.

This new release (2.1.3) adds support for keyboard shortcuts but they are not — as far as I could see — documented. This leads to much fun with guessing and trial and error.

Preferences allow the user to set defaults for frequency of checking and message handling:

It also integrates with Growl, which does the heavy lifting for the notifications themselves.

The notifications comes in the style of Growl’s “smoky glass” Bezel.

Some people swear by the productivity and focus gains of using notifiers rather than email clients to monitor email traffic.

I am not entirely convinced. I remain a great fan of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach (he’s writing a book! ), with its stress on reducing the intrusiveness of email checks in your work. In my experience, he is right that,

“always on” email checkers have a tendency not only to blow a lot of unnecessary time and attention on scanning the horizon, but that the quality of their resulting email work often suffers.”

Still, if you have a cast-iron will and you’re looking for a notification utility, this one is nice.

Notify is shareware and is available from the developer’s web site . It normally costs USD 10, but is currently on sale for 30% less.

Of course, mail.appetizer also creates lovely notifications and is now (in beta form) compatible with 10.6.4. And it’s donationware.

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! mail.app, apple mail, tips, hyperlinks, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, bulleted lists, customising

Late last year, I posted about a new plugin for mail.app, miniMail which offers a minimised “iTunes-like” interface for Apple Mail.

Then it was at 1.0.2, now it is at 1.1. And its list of features gets longer and better with each update.

When the plugin is installed, clicking the green bubble in the top left hand corner of Mail results in a mini-interface just like the iTunes option:

It now boasts an impressive array of keyboard shortcuts, mostly the same as mail.app’s own, although it has some of its own:

• Return will open up the individual message in mail
• Spacebar opens up a Preview pane, or “Quickview-esque” view of the message
• Right and Left Arrows move to the previous or next message
• The Command key plus an arrow moves to the first or last message

Here’s a screenshot with the plugin’s Preview Pane on display and the list of supported Mail shortcuts:

It adds its own tab to Mail’s Preference where further options can be set, including displaying the subject and sender on separate lines for greater readability, whether to start Mail with the miniMail interface displayed by default, the font size of the main text and more.

Of course, I am always going to use my Mail beautiful, bold and big (is there a more lovely sight for a Mac user than a fully-tricked out Mail.app doing its thing?), but people who are conscious of screen real estate will love this.

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) but offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, itunes, interface hack, plugin, keyboard shortcuts

After switching to mail.app from Thunderbird, the blogger at 48-Hour Days found that that she (or he) couldn’t live without Thunderbird’s F8 keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the Preview Pane.

As everyone knows, you can show or hide it in Apple Mail by double-clicking the small dot in the separator between the Mail Viewer and the Preview Pane — Apple’s Technote shows you how.

But if that is not quick enough for you, 48-Hour Days provides an applescript that will automate the process and which can be bound to a Quicksilver trigger or FastScript’s shortcut.

Only hardcore keyboard fanatics will want to use this, but there are people like that out there, and this post is for them. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, applescript, preview pane, tips

MiniMail is a plugin that allows Mail.app users to minimise Mail’s interface into an “iTunes like” mini-format, instead of to the Dock. It must have come out when I was on a break from Hawk Wings, so a new Leopard-ready release gives me a chance to look it over.

It installs as a classical Mail mailbundle. When active, clicking on the Green “+” button in the top left hand corner of Mail.app, reduces the interface to space-saving proportions:

It features a Get Mail, New Mail and Options menu with the most frequently used actions, as well as providing support behind the scenes for all of Mail’s keyboard shortcuts:

The pane itself can be resized to the dimensions that suit the user.

It also offers options in a pane within MAil Preferences which allows the user to chose which mailboxes to monitor for new messages:

MiniMail is shareware (USD 9) although it offers a 30 day free demo. You can get it from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, itunes, interface hack, plugin, keyboard shortcuts

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluring

Michael Boyle finds Mail frustrating to get around in.

He asks:

Why oh Why can’t Apple Mail allow me to navigate with the arrow keys the way NetNewsWire does? The relationship between the feeds pane and each feed’s posts in NNW is so fast and intuitive; whereas there seems to be no relationship between the mailboxes pane and the message panes in Apple Mail.

I am happy to admit that driving NetNewsWire with the keyboard alone is a pleasure.

However, it can also be done in Mail, even if the process is not quite as intuitive.

If you are keyboard-only kind of person, see an earlier Hawk Wings post “Moving around Mail.app using the keyboard“.mail.app, apple mail, Tips, keyboard shortcuts, tab key, conversations, netnewswire, productivity