Doug Lerner wants to take Mail.app and his messages with him and plug it into any Mac he can find.

He posts in the Apple Discussions:

Apparently Thunderbird supports a “portable mailbox” feature. In other words, you can keep your mail on a USB RAM drive, and just plug it in to whatever computer you are using – Mac or Windows – and Thunderbird just uses that mailbox instead of one on your HD.

My friend’s USB RAM was only 2GB and he was getting worried about reaching capacity, so he started using his 20GB iPod instead, which works just as well.

I wonder if such a thing is possible with Apple’s Mail app.

Naturally, the idea that Thunderbird can do anything better than Mail.app sends me into a frenzy.

Clever people have developed a couple of ways to use Mail.app on memory sticks or iPods.

Portable Mail is a clever hack that opens a local copy of Mail.app on whatever Mac you are using with preferences stored on a USB stick. If the stick is big enough to cal also store your Mail folder and everything else on it as well.

Developer Carlo Gandolfi has recently released SyncPAppsX , a helper app that syncs the local and portable settings for a range of his portable iApps including Portable Mail, making it even easier not to miss a beat. Nice.

Jeffrey Glover has worked out a way to store his Mail and Mail Downloads on an iPod. By creating some symbolic links, he shows you how to force Mail to use the messages on the iPod, regardles of which Mac it is plugged into.

Obviously, by creating different symbolic links, you could move the Mail folder to any remote volume, a network drive perhaps, and so share the same messages between two or more Macs on the one network. It’s an interesting way to share POP messages between multiple Macs, although I wouldn’t want to guess what would happen if more than one Mac was writing to the Mail folder at the same time.mail.app, apple mail, portable apps, usb stick, memory stick, ipod, mobility, productivity, thunderbird

Making use of Yojimbo’s newly-expanded “applescriptability”, Steve Kalkwarf has knocked out an applescipt that copies notes and passwords tagged with “ipod” to an iPod.

It creates a sub-folder called “Yojimbo” in the Notes folder of your iPod and copies all the matching items to it. Of course, with a little bit of tweaking in Script Editor, you could easily set the script to transfer notes with a different tag.

A couple of things to note:

If the note is longer than ~4KB, it gets chopped up into chapters.

A poster on the Yojimbo Mailing warns that notes containing a colon in their title may not behave well in the transfer.

I don’t have an iPod to test this. I only buy Apple products that can run Mail.app. Still, by all accounts it works a treat. not apple mail, yojimbo, applescript, ipod, notes, syncing, PDA road warrior, mobility, productivity

Ryos has written an AppleScript that will move emails from a dedicated mailbox in Mail.app onto an iPod.

When you run the script for the first time, it creates a “MailPod” mailbox in Apple Mail. Move any emails that you want to take with you into that folder, run the script again and it will move them into a “MailPod” folder under the iPod’s Extras menu.

Works great.

Ryos’ script is a freeware alternative to shareware apps like iPDA and MailToPod (not for 10.4) which offer greater automation and features, but cost money.

You can get the script from Ryo’s web site .ipod, mail.app, apple mail, email to go, productivity, mobility