mail.app « Hawk Wings

Posts Tagged ‘mail.app’

Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Dinosaur 120px Nothing raises the temperature among email aficionados like the debate over top-posting and bottom-posting in replies.

I have my own barbaric views on this topic.

QuoteFix is a plugin for mail.app that answers every bottom-poster’s heart-felt cry.

When installed, it places the cursor below the original message, or below the selection if you highlighted some part of the message before hitting the reply button.

And it does it well:

It also claims to remove the signature from the original message and to remove unnecessary empty lines from the original message.

I have found performance more patchy on these two fronts, but the plugin is still in active beta development, so it’s unreasonable to expect too much.

If bottom posting is your thing and you use mail.app, you will want to test it for yourself.

Get the QuoteFix plugin and read the installation instructions on its Google Code page.

Tags: Apple Mail, bottom-posting, mail.app, plugin, signatures, top-posting, wars of religion

Tags: Apple Mail, bottom-posting, mail.app, plugin, signatures, top-posting, wars of religion
Posted in Apple Mail Plug-ins | 7 Comments »

Scripts to integrate Toodledo with mail.app and MailTags

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Hawk Wings reader Himanshu Shukla emails to share two applescripts he has written which integrate the online to-do manangement service Toodledo with Apple Mail and the prince of productivity plugins, MailTags .

His first script simply pipes a selected email from mail.app into your online Toodledo account, where it will wait for you to tag it, give it a context and a project or folder.

The second, more complicated script uses MailTags to tag and add other information to the task before you send it off.

When this script is run, it open up a copy of the email, ready to forward to Toodledo and offers you the chance to map fields from the message’s MailTags pane onto categories that Toodledo understands:

Keywords in Mailtags = Context in Toodledo
Project in Mailtags = Folder in Toodledo
Due-date in Mailtags = Due-date in Toodledo

Priorities:

Very Low (Mailtags) = “-1. Negative” (Toodledo)
Low (Mailtags) = “0. Low” (Toodledo)
Normal (Mailtags) = “1. Medium” (Toodledo)
High (Mailtags) = “2. High” (Toodledo)
Urgent (Mailtags) = “3. Top” (Toodledo)

Clever! You can tag and process the task without leaving Mail’s interface.

Of course, it’s even more clever to trigger the script with a keyboard shortcut, either in Quicksilver or Fastscripts or MailTags’ sister app, Mail Act-on:

You can get the scripts from Himanshu’s web site where they are freeware.

Combined with Toodledo’s own iPhone app or the Action Lists iPhone app , which is a dedicated GTD system using Toodledo as its backend, you can recreate a robust workflow for Getting Things Done that goes with you on the road.

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, getting things done, gtd, mail.app, plugins, scripts, toodledo

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, getting things done, gtd, mail.app, plugins, scripts, toodledo
Posted in Apple Mail Plug-ins, Productivity | 1 Comment »

Fixing Mail.app’s Undeleted Drafts Bug

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Bug 2 Over at Rixstep , the blogger is in a fiesty mood. But in the midst of his claims about “a lot of buggy code in Mail.app” and how “Apple never respond with fixes”, he does raise a good point.

Snow Leopard, and Leopard before it, are not every good at deleting draft emails.

Its auto-save function leaves orphaned messages behind in its cache that are not registered in your Drafts folder (or on your IMAP server).

You can try this out for yourself.

Draftproblemshowsempty First check your Drafts folder in Apple Mail and make sure that it looks empty.

Then open up your ~/Library/Mail folder, navigate to the Draft folder of your email account and open up the “Messages” folder. Although the folder shows iteslf empty in mail.app, in fact there are lots of auto-saved drafts in there!

Now if you are security conscious, or your work has particularly strict data management policies, then this is clearly a bad thing.

Draftproblemrebuild Otherwise, it’s just an annoying thing. They don’t do any harm but, still, Mail.app should be smarter than that.

Fortunately, the solution recommended by Rixstep–”you’ll have to go to the command line regularly to remove the orphans”–is not the only option.

There is a much easier way.

To remove the ghosts all you have to do is highlight the Drafts folder in Mail’s list of mailboxes on the left, and then select the Rebuild option from the Mailbox menu.

Poof! They’re gone.

Well, they are gone for the moment. You will need to do this again and again if the bug troubles you. And that’s the annoying part.

To make sure that is worked for you, you can check back in the Drafts folder of your Mail folder.

Mine looks good:

Tags: annoyances, Apple Mail, apple mail tips, bugs, drafts, hopper, imap, mail.app

Tags: annoyances, Apple Mail, apple mail tips, bugs, drafts, hopper, imap, mail.app
Posted in Apple Mail Bugs, Apple Mail Tips | 3 Comments »

Script to archive emails into Evernote

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Applescript 100px Justin at veritrope has written an applescript that will quickly import emails from mail.app into Evernote , the web-based note and information manager.

It’s easy to use.

First, get the script from veritrope.

Like all Apple Mail-related scripts, the best place to store it is in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder, so that it appears at the top of the AppleScript menu when mail.app is open.

Then find the email that you want to save into Evernote, highlight it and click the AppleScript menu on the right of your menubar:

The script grabs the email and shunts into Evernote. It loads the message first into Evernote’s Desktop app from which it syncs up automatically.

The script also presents a dialogue so that you can tag the email and select where to store it:

Chosing the “Select notebook from list” options retrieves a list of your existing notebook and also offers you the option to create a new notebook on the fly.

A nice Growl alert lets you know when it’s done.

The end result is a new Evernote note, nicely tagged-up and with a hyperlink back to the original message in mail.app:

Of course, it all goes much faster if you fire the script with a trigger in Quicksilver or set a keyboard shortcut for it with a utility like Daniel Jalkut’s excellent FastScripts .

veritrope also provides a fistful of applescripts for integrating Evernote with other popular apps like Yojimbo, NeetNewsWire, MacJournal, DEVONThink, even (of all things) Entourage.

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, evernote, FastScripts, mail.app, plugins, Productivity, quicksilver, Script, yojimbo

Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, evernote, FastScripts, mail.app, plugins, Productivity, quicksilver, Script, yojimbo
Posted in Apple Mail Plug-ins, Productivity | 4 Comments »

10.6.2 broke my Mail plugin! :-(

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Images Apple has changed the way that Mail.app interacts with plugins in Snow Leopard.

As Ken Aspelagh describes it on the Mac Observer:

“Each new version of Mail and the associated Message framework includes a unique code. Plug-ins have to explicitly declare themselves compatible with each new version,” Mr. Aspeslagh told The Mac Observer. “There is some sense to this as plug-ins are closely tied to the inner working of Mail, and stand the chance of breaking when Mail.app updates. Apple didn’t want to take this chance, so now they automatically disable all plug-ins with each update.”

So today’s 10.6.2 update is likely to break some plugins.

Most developers are only too aware of this issue, and will get updated plugins out fast.

Greg Welch, who develops the MailRecent and MailFollowUp plugins, has already got new, 10.6.2-compatible versions out the door.

Eric Hinterbichler has done the same with his new Herald Notification utility.

Other developers are sure to follow quickly. Some acted weeks before the update appeared, like Aaron Harnly who pushed out a compatible version of his Letterbox plugin three weeks ago.

10.6.2 broke the Mail clipping plugin from Omnifocus, but fortunately this can be restored simply by reinstalling it.

Other plugins, especially those not so actively or quickly supported, might be more difficult.

langui.sh has published some Terminal commands that will (potentially) revive other busted plugins. He has written them for GrowlMail but they could easily be adapted for other plugins, and “trick” them into working again.

It’s worth a shot, especially if you are in love with a plugin that’s not so well supported. However, maybe make a backup of the plugin’s bundle first. You know, just in case.

Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, mail.app, plugins, snow leopard, UUID

Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, mail.app, plugins, snow leopard, UUID
Posted in Apple Mail Plug-ins, Apple Mail Tips | 8 Comments »

Clever miniMail plugin for mail.app re-released!

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Mini Mailstandfirst Scott Morrison of Indev Software (producers of the MailTags and Mail Act-on plugins) has released a souped-up version of the miniMail plugin, which he recently acquired from Olive Toast Software.

miniMail 2.0 retains all the goodness of the original–the ability to minimize Mail.app’s interface like you can in iTunes–but adds more features and flexibility.

The minimised interface is elegant and efficient, as you would expect from the developer of MailTags:

It is also fully integrated with Mail Act-on, allowing you to use the same keystrokes to file messages away quickly.

The plugin’s Preference pane offers options to control which mailboxes it monitors, text size inside the minimized interface itself and how it should expand again when double-clicked (to the mail mail.app window or a single message window):

The Preference pane also controls miniMail 2.0’s new feature–multiple mini viewers.

You can now open a Message Viewer for a number of individual mailboxes and minimize them to keep track of new messages in particular accounts or even RSS feeds.

Here I am monitoring my work email in one miniMail window, my Hawk Wings email in another (one canny doctoral student sends his emails to both!) and the network status RSS feed of my ISP:

Very handy for keeping focus on important things whilst filtering out the rest.

miniMail is shareware (USD 12.95) and is available from Indev’s web site . Registered users of MailTags and Mail Act-on qualify for a USD 4 discount.

Tags: Apple Mail, mail act-on, mail.app, mailtags, miniMail, plugins, Productivity

Tags: Apple Mail, mail act-on, mail.app, mailtags, miniMail, plugins, Productivity
Posted in Apple Mail Plug-ins, Productivity | 1 Comment »

Posts Tagged ‘mail.app’

Bottom posters rejoice! QuoteFix plugin is here