Merlin Mann, 43 Folders productivity bodhisattva, offers some tips on using Mail Act-on to increase productivity and handle the hackwork of filing and processing your emails.

He shows you how to make several clever Mail Act-on rules that interact with Mail’s smart folders and MailTags to create a workflow that works for him.

He also offers a sneaky tip for remapping the Caps Lock key to the Control key function. No more weirdly bent pinkies for him!

As Merlin says,

I’m really just scratching the surface on what you can do with Mail Act-On — I’m sure there are power users out there who are doing much sexier stuff with it — but I wanted to make sure people know that this is most definitely not just for geeks and high-volume email users. In my opinion, this is functionality that should (and eventually will) be included as a stock feature in Mail.app.

mail.app, apple mail, tips, mail acton, plugins, productivity, workflow, rules

Georg Klein has released updated versions of Mail2iCal (1.4) and Mail2iCalToDo (1.4), applescripts that will create an iCal event or ToDo from a message in Mail.app.

There doesn’t appear to be a changelog anywhere, but I am guessing that these new scripts are better than the old ones in several interesting and important ways.

UPDATE: And I guessed right. Georg posts in the comments:

1.4 adds a (limited) means for calendar designation: when run from a rule, the scripts will place the calendars in a calendar named after the rule, creating a new calendar if necessary. Since many users seem to use the scripts with Mail ActOn, the scripts try to determine the Mail ActOn prefix and delimiter, using only the last part of the rulename as calendar (e.g. “ActOn: e | Important” will lead to a calendar named Important). Manual execution is unchanged.

You can get the latest versions from Georg’s web site.