Anonymous asks in a comment on another post:

Why do people (not just you) insist on calling it Mail.app? Every application has the .app extension. You don’t refer to Entourage as Entourage.app. We don’t call it Finder.app or Safari.app. :-) If Mail (with a capital M) is ambiguous, just use Apple Mail as you do in the sub-title of your blog.

Good question. I am familiar with this argument, put most forcefully by the universally celebrated and acclaimed Mac blogger John Gruber a few years ago.

Four thoughts occur to me:

First, I myself favour a varied and inclusive approach. On this blog you will find the app described as “Mail”, “Apple Mail” and “Mail.app”. I’m opposed to the prescriptive stance (”You may only call it / do / believe / support this one thing - or that one thing”) in general, including on this matter.

Secondly, the title “mail.app” is a title of affection, harking back to the origins of the app in NeXT. Safari and iChat do not have the same pedigree. I suppose I ought to call Dock (also part of NeXT) “Dock.app”, but I don’t feel the same affection towards that app as I do towards Mail.

Titles of affection are often idiosyncratic or irregular, and none the worse for it. I often call my son “little man” but do not feel compelled to call my daughter “little woman”. I have a pet name for my MacBook Pro, but don’t feel that I need to come up with similar names for the PCs in the house.

Thirdly, I find it hard to believe that people who are generally open-minded and generous in their worldview could - inconsistently (!) - be so narrow and ungenerous in their views on this issue. (I’m not pointing a finger at John here. My fingers aren’t pointy enough).

Fourthly, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald put it best in a Cole Porter George Gershwin song:

You say either and I say either,
You say neither and I say neither.
Either, either,
Neither, neither,
Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto.
Potato, potahto,
Tomato, tomahto,
Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off,
then we must part.
And oh, if we ever part,
then that might break my heart.

UPDATE: Fifthly (this didn’t occur to me), lots of people who posted comments clearly find it a useful way to counter the generic title “Mail”. Using the title “mail.app” to distinguish this mail client from other mail clients or the application from the messages, makes for more productive Google searches and greater clarity in communication.

This argument may gain extra power from Microsoft’s innovative decision to call the mail client built into Vista “Windows Mail”.

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Alex King ponders the complexities of constructing an email signature that is both comprehensive and easily readable.

Mail.app doesn’t allow you to specify a particular sig for each email address alias associated with the one account. (Find out how to run multiple email addresses from one account in Mail).

Alex’s solution involves creating a “mash-up” signature that embraces all your different email contexts.

But should it be wide or tall? Cryptic or fulsome?

I disagree with his instinct for “going wide”. Do you?

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From a thread on the Apple Mail Discussions Board come some tips for going backwards in Mail.app from the new emlx file format in Mail 2.0 to Panther Mail’s mbox format:

1. The emlx to mbox converter that’s been blogged here before, but with a step-by-step walkthrough.
2. Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts contains an Archive script that can export Tiger’s emlx files as an mbox file.

One poster is going backwards because Tiger Mail has too many problems. Another is going backwards for various reasons he won’t go into. A third user on MacUsers.org is going backwards because his work set-up demands it.

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• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail
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For the past few days, posting has been suspended on the Apple Discussion Forums as Apple worked to improve the service.

Now the discussions are open again, with a number of changes:

• There’s a new look to the discussions themselves.
• There’s a new URL: http://discussions.apple.com
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds.
• You can now see the posts marked with your local dates and times.
• Posts can be marked as Questions and then marked as Answers, making it easier to see where the good info is.

Readers of this blog are probably most interested in the Mail and Address Book forums, one for 10.4 and one for 10.3 and earlier.

If you don’t read those from time to time, you should. Andreas Amann (the developer of Mail Scripts), Allan Sampson, Ernie Stamper and various other Level 4 Apple Mail gods hang out there, solving problems and posting useful stuff.

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Buried away in OS X’s System Preferences is the little-used ability to add or modify keyboard shortcuts.

If you open the “Keyboard and Mouse” Preference Pane in System Preferences and then select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, you will see a list of existing shortcuts like this:

The shortcuts that control screenshots, keyboard navigation, using the Dictionary, opening Spotlight and so on are all there.

Down the bottom is a section for adding application-specific shortcuts. Here you can do two things to make Apple Mail behave the way you want.

Adding shortcuts

You can add a keyboard shortcut for any menu command. Click on the plus sign, select Mail as the application, enter the exact text of the command as it appears in the menu and then the shortcut that you want for it.

You will see in the screenshot that I have added two. Control-Option-Command-1 now sets the priority of a message I am composing to “High”. I only know one person with a Hotmail address, but it’s my brother, so I need a quick work-around during the current “Hotmail is eating Apple Mail messages” crisis to make sure that my emails get through to him. A Keyboard shortcut is quicker (for me) than the other options.

I’ve also added a shortcut for “Add Hyperlink…” (Option-Command-H) for those rare times when I am composing an email in Rich Text. Again it’s quicker than mousing up to the Message menu and selecting it from here.

Modifying Shortcuts

You can also change the shortcuts assigned by default to various commands in Mail.app. Again you will see from the screenshot that I have changed one. By default, sending an email in Apple Mail is achieved by pressing Shift-Command-D.

Two years after switching from Windows, that still doesn’t make sense to me. So, I’ve changed it to Shift-Command-S. I could have changed it to Command-S but then I would lose that shortcut as a way to save an email as a draft. The default Shift-Command-S command, “Save as…” I never use, so I don’t miss giving it up.

One word of caution. Setting up your own shortcuts is fun and helps you work quicker on your own Mac. But the more you change, the more out of sync you get with the rest of the Mac-using world. If you ever need to use another Mac, your shortcuts won’t work, your fingers will instinctively do the wrong thing and you’ll have forgotten the default shortcuts. Sometimes it is smarter just to learn the new or odd shortcut.

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