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

Tags: Address Book, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, contacts, icons, macOSXHints, mail.app, mailtags, Notes, Productivity, spell checking, to dos

macOSXHints is running a poll on its readers’ preferred email client.

With 387 votes cast, the results are looking pretty good:

Still, there is always room for improvement :)

Thunderbird, further down the table, stands at 4.9% and “Gmail on the web” at 7.39%.

[Thanks, Scott]mail.app, Apple mail, poll, thunderbird, gmail, macosxhints

Tags: Apple Mail, GMAIL, macOSXHints, mail.app, poll, thunderbird

The tips and hints web site macOSXHints is five years old today.

TUAW gets my vote as the quirkiest Apple web site, ThinkSecret and MacRumors as the best news sites and Versiontracker and MacUpdate as the sites on which I waste the most time.

But as a relatively-recent switcher, macOSXHints is the Apple site from which I have learnt the most about OS X and Apple Mail. You know, the good stuff, the stuff that isn’t in the books.

Happy Birthday! And wishing it many more.

Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, macOSXHints