A traveller in Auckland New Zealand snapped this roadside shot of a converted G4 PowerMac:

[via Gizmodo , Boing Boing , etc, etc]apple mail, mail.app, mailbox, postbox, 101 uses for an old Mac

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has discovered a 100% reliable way to make Mail.app destroy an email. Not lose it, but destroy it.

The procedure is complicated and involves copying an email from one mailbox to another in your Mail Drawer, then immediately clicking on another mailbox and then hitting Command-Z or selecting the “Undo” button from the Edit menu.

If you manage to do this while Mail.app is still transferring the initial message to its new mailbox, hitting Command-Z will not undo the initial move, but cause the email to vanish completely.

Pierre is not impressed:

It is really quite unacceptable. There is no excuse for it. It’s quite obvious that it’s a problem related to Mail’s multithreading capabilities. Mail can move a message in one thread and let you select another mailbox in another thread at the same time. But this screws up its “Undo” sequence completely, and Mail clearly forgets where to put the message back when you undo the action! So it just lets the message vanish altogether!

Data integrity is always paramount. We can live with bugs that make simple actions more complex than they should be, or force us to go through workarounds to achieve what we want to achieve. But bugs that destroy our data with no chance of recovery are simply bad. They are the worst kind.

Take a read of his whole post. Or his whole blog. There’s a lot to learn there.

Apple Mail’s most eagle-eyed critic doesn’t miss much.

Emailchemy is a conversion utility that “reads mailboxes from the proprietary formats of the most popular (and many of yesterday’s forgotten) email applications and converts it to a standard, portable format that any application can use.”

It already converts from an astonishing range of source formats into an equally astonishing range of target formats. (See earlier Hawk Wings post for a full list).

A new version has been released which adds support for CompuServe2000 for Windows, CompuServe for Macintosh (aka “CompuServe Classic” or “MacCIM“) and Musashi. It also contains GUI improvements and minor bugfixes.

It was once free for a one-off use, but now seems to be shareware (USD 25). It is available from the developer’s web site.

Over at 43Folders (from which Hawk Wings has learnt much), Merlin Mann recommends creating a DMZ mailbox in your email client.

Create the folder, dump your old outstanding emails into it, and begin the New Year with a clean Inbox and a fresh mind.

You still have to deal with the unfinished business, but the new start enables you to staunch the mental bleeding from that feeling of being so far behind.

You might even gain the focus to return to the DMZ folder with renewed enthusiasm after the day’s new mail is dealt with.

A good tip. But elusive, like the sound of one hand clapping. (I blame those Buddhism tapes).

He’s getting a bit of flak in the comments, which may show just how attached people are to their unfinished business!

Apple Mail can count the number of unread emails in your inboxes, but by default it can’t tell you how many are in which account.

DockStar is a utility that allows you to assign a separate notification badge to different mailboxes.

It comes in the form of a classical plugin installing itself as a bundle with an options screen in Mail.app’s Preferences:

In the options you can assign a badge to up to 5 different mailboxes, choose from four different shapes, set the the size of each badge and select colour you want for each mailbox.

The result is a riot of notification badges, undeniably more colourful and possibly more informative:

DockStar is shareware (USD 8) and available from the developer’s web site.plugin, notification badges, bundle, mail.app, apple mail, account, mailbox