Jumsoft has released a pack of additional mail stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The pack contains 50 “high-quality and exclusive design options for every occasion”, covering Family, Congratulations, Invitations, Emotions, Vacations and Seasons themes.

An additional group are described as “Neutral”, or multi-purpose.

You can view small thumbnails of all the templates on the Jumsoft web site, but some examples of the “Neutral” category are displayed below:

    

The pack costs USD 39 and is available from Jumsoft’s web site .

Value-conscious readers will want to compare this pack of 50 with the pack of 111 templates from equinix (reviewed in an earlier Hawk Wings post). The equinix pack retails for 24.95 euros (c. USD 40), twice as many template choices for almost the same price.

Of course, really value-conscious readers will want to make their own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ) or look at the increasing number of stationery templates offered for free.

Novcon.net has started a collection of free stationery templates, which now contains sixteen examples. Users can rate the ones they like best. The current winner is an attractive “parchment” template.

The Novcon site also contains instructions on how to install the stationery.

Templates in the Jumsoft pack and on the Novcon.net site are now listed in the Templates section of the comprehensive Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.templates, stationery, html, leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

UPDATE: A post today claims to explain it all.

According to a post on AppleInsider , the apps in Snow Leopard are going to be dramatically smaller and more efficient.

This weight-loss regime is prompted by the need to slim Mac OS X down for the growing number of mobile devices, so RoughlyDrafted (the source of the AppleInsider report) suggests.

As the graphic below demonstrates, the new apps are significantly smaller; Mail.app alone loses 196MB, over 68% of its current size:

Who would have thought that Mail.app had so much weight to lose?

According to AppleInsider some of the efficiency comes from a greater centralisation of resources in Snow Leopard:

Among the technologies believed to be aiding the downsizing are Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics with smaller vector graphics files, and Localization, which extracts the plethora of localized language files from each individual application and instills them into a centralized container accessible to each application.

Mail.app users can also look forward to more complete text handling features like auto word correction, smart dash insertion and more. mail.app, apple mail, snow leopard, leopard mail, apple, localization, resolution indendence

Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (“I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found – and loves – MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxes

After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.

Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver , Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.

It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:

Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:

Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.

The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.

The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:

Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.

Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.

Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.

Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page . quicksilver, secrets, preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, tweaks

The Hawk Wings plugin and add-on list contains over 140 plug-ins, add-ons, scripts and utilities to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book smarter, faster and better.

Today it gains a new section for Leopard Mail templates.

I’ve managed to round up 122 templates, including the 111 contained in Equinux’s shareware bundle. The others are all freeware and are themed for Christmas, sober business use, New Year’s and the birth of a baby girl (oddly missing from Apple’s default list).

If I have missed any, let me know.

Of course you can always “roll your own” which is more satisfying. Tutorials abound. See The Apple Blog , The Graphic Mac and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity .

I’ve also added Eaglefiler to the section on Archiving.

The plug-in list itself is sadly in need of revision.

Some plug-ins have disappeared, the development of some like the notification utility iNotify has been stopped so that they are not compatible with Leopard and others have moved around due to web site changes. And there are many more new utilities that I still haven’t added.

I’ll work through it slowly. Promise. plugins, plug-ins, add-ons, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, html templates, leopard mail, applescript, productivity

The new mail alert sound in Mail.app was broken when Leopard was released last year. Three updates later, and it’s still broken.

[UPDATE: In deference to posters in the comments below, I should point out that not everyone experiences this problem. It only affects most/many/some/a few users. Like me.]

Fortunately, there is a work-around which you can use until Apple gets around to fixing the problem. It’s a bit fiddly, but not too forbidding.

First download this zip file from Hawk Wings which contains an applescript and the default “new mail” audio file.

Unzip it, and place the audio file in your ~/Library/Sounds folder (where “~” is shorthand for your user directory).

Then open up the script in place the script in Script Editor. You will see that all it does is execute a shell script — do shell script "afplay /Users/timbo/Library/Sounds/NewMail.aiff > /dev/null 2>&1 &". You will need to edit it to replace the name of my user directory with yours.

Then save it in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder. If you don’t have such a folder, it’s worth creating one.

Now you need to create a rule in Mail.app that triggers the script whenever a new email arrives.

Open up the Rules pane in Mail’s Preferences:

Create a new rule. Call it something creative like “New Mail Alert Work-around” and fill out the rest as per the screenshot. I like to restrict it to people who are in my list of previous senders–it’s a quick and dirty way to rule out being alerted to the arrival of spam. Obviously, there are other ways to select conditions here which restrict when the alert will be triggered.

Also, in the “Perform the following action” field, you will need to select “Run AppleScript”, then navigate to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail and select the NewMailAlert.scpt that you saved there earlier.

All done. Send yourself a test email, and rejoice. Mail.app is talking to you again.

For extra spice you could use one of the hundreds of mail alert sounds listed at Email Gifs and Sounds (Or perhaps Scully is more your thing?) but have compassion on your work colleagues. That could get really annoying after a while.

[With thanks to the original posters in an Apple Discussion thread ] mail.app, leopard mail, apple mail, bugs, workarounds, tips, new mail alert, applescript

Reo-2007 has written a theme to give Thunderbird the “leopard Mail look”. This is the first Leopard Mail skin I’ve seen for Thunderbird, although others exist to give Mail.app the Tiger Mail and Panther Mail look.

If, for some reason, you have to use Thunderbird, it might as well look as much like Apple Mail as possible.

Reo-2007′s skin is a mixture of theme, extensions and customised CSS which combine to give the look of Leopard Mail as well as some of Leopard Mail’s new functionality, like Notes.

The overall effect is well done:

One extension provides the option to add Notes to emails, just like you can in Leopard Mail. When the Notes toolbar icon is clicked, a pop-up window appears:

The skin will only work on Thunderbird 2.0+. You can get it from Reo-2007′s page on DeviantART.thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, skins, themes, email in general, notes