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.

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.

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:

mail.app, apple mail, bugs, tips, imap, hopper, drafts, annoyances

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.evernote, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, script, plugins, quicksilver, fastscripts, yojimbo, productivity

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.apple mail, snow leopard, mail.app, plugins, UUID, Apple

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.mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, mail act-on, minimail, plugins, productivity

Several readers have posted in the comments of an earlier post, asking how to email a file using Google’s Quick Search Box (QSB) utility.

It was much easier to know to do this in Quicksilver using a trigger.

In QSB it’s not as obvious, but it’s easy.

First you need to have QSB itself loaded and Martin Kühl’s Services plugin (see earlier Hawk Wings post).

Select the file that you want to email in Finder or on your Desktop or wherever.

Activate QSB. Type Command-G (⌘-G) to “get current selection”:

Type “email” into the dialog:

Hit the tab key to advance to the next screen:

Hit the Enter key to select “Perform Service” and — violà — a new email appears the file attached:

What could be simpler? QSB is not in Quicksilver’s league yet, but I have high hopes.quicksilver, google quick search box, QSB, apple mail, mail.app,tips

Secrets, a clever little System Preference Pane that makes tweaking “hidden” features of Mac OS X easy (see earlier Hawk Wings post for more), has been updated to 1.0.6 and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.

Secrets provides easy assess to many of Mac Os X’s settings that you can otherwise only change by messing around in Terminal with long command strings, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It includes tweaks for many Mac core and a wide range of third-party apps. The most popular tweaks across all the apps are listed separately as well.

Of course, here we are most interested in its options for Mail.app:

Secrets Mail Preferences

As you can see from the screenshot, Secrets allows you to

• specify a default BCC email address
• force Mail to display messages in plain text
• set the Bundle compatibility and enable bundles
• enable and disable the data detectors
• switch the new (annoying) Snow Leopard behaviour of including names in copied email addresses on and off
• set a sent mail sound
• specify a minimum for HTML messages and a preferred text encoding
• request read receipts
• set the interval for refreshing Mail’s RSS feeds
• Decide whether to display attachments inline or not.

And more.

Some people will think of it as a hack and might be wary. However it comes with the reassurance that Alcor, the developer also (once) behind Quicksilver, is its creator. That’s a strong pedigree.

Secrets is freeware and available from the Blacktree web site .

UPDATE: I read on TUAW that the Blacktree site is overloaded. Secrets is also available from the app’s page on code.google.com. secrets, preferences, hidden preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, tweaks, tips, bundles

equinux, purveyors of fine HTML stationary for Mail.app, has released a new collection of Christmas stationery templates in plenty of time for the festive season.

“Season’s Greetings Vol. 2″ contains templates offering Christmas greetings, invitations, wishlists for your kids to send to Santa, templates for one of those much-loved “annual news-roundup” emails.

Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are not forgotten. Templates are included for those festivals too.

For those not in the know, Apple Mail’s stationery feature allows the app to send pre-made HTML emails, often quite fancy. Many of the equinux templates allow for customization by the insertion of your own photos and user-definable fonts:

The pack costs €7,95 (c. USD 11.80) and is available from equinux’s web site where you can also see the company’s other stationery packs.

If you are keen on this kind of thing, and know that your friends don’t mind receiving them, but you don’t want to shell out money for the option, you will find some freeware seasonal stationery templates listed in the following, previous Hawk Wings posts:

1. Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates.

2. More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free.

[via macnews.de ]stationery, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, addons, Christmas, hanukkah, Kwanzaa, festive season, more bandwidth-sucking tomfoolery