Posts Tagged ‘mailbox’

Taking Apple Mail to a whole new level

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

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

applemailbox

[via Gizmodo , Boing Boing , etc, etc]

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A 100% reliable way to destroy messages

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

betaloguePierre 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.

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Emailchemy 1.7: Amazing mailbox converter

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

emailchemyEmailchemy 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.

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Fresh Start: 43Folders’ De-Mailed Zone

Thursday, January 5th, 2006

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!

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