Hawk Wings » outlook

Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:43:03 +0000

Microsoft has confirmed that its premier email client, Outlook, will remain non-compliant with web standards in the next version of MS Office due out in 2010.

The statement comes in response to a campaign launched by the Email Standards Project , asking Microsoft to provide Outlook with text rendering that complies with web standards (like almost every other major email client on the market — see a list of them ), and to reverse the decision made in Office 2007 to use Word’s text engine rather than an HTML-compliant editor to compose emails.

MS Word does not provide support for key elements of CSS design tags like float, margin, padding, background-image and many more. You can quickly get a sense of the problem by looking at this image of an email displayed by Outlook 2000 and 2007:

In a post on the Outlook Team Blog , the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Communications and Forms Team William Kennedy says that,

…while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.

Of course, a lack of web standards is not the only problem Outlook causes for Mail.app users, perhaps not even the main one.

The Campaign to fix Outlook is not giving up. You can read more about it on its web site or, if you twitter, make your compliant known that way.mail.app, apple mail, web standards, html, outlook, microsoft, officeSimilar Posts:

How plugins turned an Entourage Girl into a Mail.app Fan

Tim Gaden — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:37:03 +0000

Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (“I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found – and loves – MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxesSimilar Posts:

YAI (Outlook meeting plugin) updated for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:48:23 +0000

John Maisley has updated his YAI (You Are Invited!) plugin for Leopard.

YAI converts invitations from MS Exchange, Google Calendar and Zimbra users into something that iCal can better understand.

It fixes annoying problems with shifting time zones, messages saying “you are not invited” and other blips that making working in a mixed-platform so annoying.

The utility comes packaged as an installer which unpacks its files into a folder in the Scripts folder in your user directory. When it’s installed, invitations are transferred straight into iCal as if they were created in iCal itself.

Further options in the installer allow you to set the background colour of a processed email invitation, mark it as flagged or not or to move it to another folder:

The updated version is not only available to Leopard users, it also improves the modification and deletion of duplicates, fixes a quirk in the way invites from some time zones without daylight saving are handled and improves the app’s option for subsequently moving the invitation to another folder.

YAI is similar to another plugin, OMiC , although the feature sets of the two plugins do not overlap completely. OMiC does more, and costs more (USD 29.95). For the extra money you get the ability to browse the inscrutable winmail.dat file in which attachments from Outlook users are sometimes packaged and more.

YAI is shareware (£3 per computer — c. USD 5.85) and has a fourteen day free trial period. You can get it from John’s web site .applescript, ical, mail.app, apple mail, invites, meetings, invitations, productivity, outlook, windows, zimbra, ms exchangeSimilar Posts:

Letterbox (widescreen plugin) for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:41:49 +0000

Aaron Harnly has taken an “all-too-welcome distraction from pressing schoolwork” to update his widescreen plugin Letterbox.

He has released the new version as a public beta.

It comes with a stand-alone plugin manager for Mail.app that can inspect, enable, disable, install and remove any Mail plugin:

The new version also features a preference pane with options to tweak the display, by toggling on and off the horizontal lines and/or different coloured backgrounds for items in the middle pane. The preview pane can be set to display on the right or underneath (an option to display the pane on the left has been switched off until some problems are resolved):

It comes with an auto-updater and Aaron promises that a two-line column for the middle pane (Ã la WideScreenMail, the other Leopard-friendly wide-screen plugin) is on the way.

It is a public beta so can expect a few minor kinks that still to be ironed out. Pick it up from Aaron’s web site.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, widescreen, entourage, outlook, plugin manager, tips, pluginsSimilar Posts:

WideMail 0.1.0: Real Widescreen Preview Column

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:11:27 +0000

Dane Harnett has released a new and improved version of his wide-screen plugin for Leopard Mail.

WideMail 0.1.0 has been ported to Objective C (with help from Scott “MailTags” Morrison) and is smaller and leaner.

But the big feature of this release is the new integrated preview column, which displays the sender, subject and date of the email much more efficiently:

Instructions on enabling this special column can be found in the readme and on Dane’s web site.

WideMail is donation-ware (via PayPal) and is available from Dane’s web site .outlook, entourage, widscreen, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, pluginsSimilar Posts:

WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:12:33 +0000

Dane Harnett has updated his new WideScreenMail plugin, giving it the much-asked for two-line preview Ã la Entourage.

This was one of the features most requested of Letterbox, the Tiger wide-screen plugin.

Entourage, you will recall, displays mailboxes on the left, and the selected message in a preview pane on the right.

The middle pane offers a listing of the selected mailbox, with each line displaying the sender, subject line and time at which the email arrived:

Now, with WideScreenMail, Mail.app users can have the same layout. The middle column now displays the sender and the subject line in one field and the time of arrival (or whatever other column(s) you select):

And, of course, unlike Entourage, you are seeing Mail’s unified inbox, and don’t need to jump from account to account to answer your email.

Obviously, this reduces by one the number of columns needed in the middle pane and makes for a more efficient use of the available space.

Dane has made the new version of the WideScreenMail plugin available on his web site .

Still no further word on Letterbox progress.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, plugins, hacks, widescreen, entourage, outlookSimilar Posts:

Wide screen plugin for Leopard Mail released

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:38:43 +0000

Dane Harnett has released a widescreen plugin for Leopard Mail, which gives Mail.app an “Entourage” or “Outlook” look.

It is not as polished as Letterbox , the first and best of the widescreen plugins developed for Tiger Mail.

Aaron Harnly is working on the Leopard version , but if you really can’t wait, and plenty of people seem to think that this is the bees’ knees of email functionality, WideScreenMailPlugin will do the trick.

In essence it shifts the preview pane from the bottom to the right-hand side of Mail.app’s interface:

WideScreenMailPlugin is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .entourage, mail.app, apple mail, outlook, widescreen, hack, pluginSimilar Posts:

While I was busy…

Tim Gaden — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:17:58 +0000

I am still working out how to manage my new Real Life job better so that Hawk Wings gets more of my time.

Most recently, while I was busy…

KIT (“Keep It Together”), a nice personal information manager that almost gives Yojimbo a run for its money, was substantially updated. It now boasts a slicker interface, searchable tags, five star rating (Ã la iTunes) and more — see the full changelog for all the improvements.
OMIC got an update too. This utility which unpacks the dreaded winmail.dat files Outlook users sometimes send (see earlier Hawk Wings review) now has support for installation over Apple Remote Desktop and for RTF text, and is packaged in a smarter installer.
MailRecent 1.0.3 now adds any moves or copies using a MailRecent menu to the “Move to … Again” (or “Copy to … Again”) menu items in the Message menu and the corresponding contextual menu. This means that the last “recent” move or copy can be repeated via that menu item or the built-in Mail keyboard shortcut Option-Command-T.

mail.app, apple mail, plugins, PIM, productivity, winmail.dat, outlook, filing, tagsSimilar Posts:

From Outlook to Mail.app with libpst

Tim Gaden — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 11:00:34 +0000

Joe Tan at Tan Tan Noodles has written up a way to switch from Outlook to Mail.app using the open source utility, libpst , which was originally developed for Linux but runs fine on Mac OSX.

There are already a number of tried and true ways to crack open Outlook’s PST files and make the transition, either using Mozilla or (for Outlook Express users) DbxConv.

Or you could use the shareware utility, O2M (formerly known as Outlook2Mac) which only costs USD 10.

Still, some people get a kick out doing this kind of thing for free, and libpst offers another way.

Joe outlines just twelve steps from downloading the source code, compiling (not as hard as you imagine) and running it, to the end result.

If I had a PST file to hand, I’d try it myself. Fortunately, I don’t.mail.app, apple mail, outlook, outlook express, microsoft, pst files, switching, freewareSimilar Posts:

You’re invited: Outlook meeting plugin for Mail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:45:10 +0000

John Maisey has written an apple-scripted plugin for Mail.app, You’re Invited, that makes working with Outlook users easier.

It is similar to another plugin, OMiC . However, the feature sets do not over-lap completely. There are some things that OMiC does that this one doesn’t, so You’re Invited has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.

As John explains on his web site:

This Mail.app rule was designed to avoid:

Text only invites appearing in Mail.

Invites arriving in Mail not being automatically sent to iCal.

Invitations arriving in iCal that create the ‘email address that isn’t on your “me” card in Address Book’ error.

Having to remember obscure key combinations.

Having to repeatedly drag/drop .ics files onto iCal.

A neat little interface adds a rule to your preferences which runs a script on incoming messages:

Invitations buried in your emails are whizzed over to iCal for processing.

Unfortunately it conflicts with something in the guts of MailTags, which means that I won’t be using it.

But if you are not using MailTags , you might (i) ask yourself, Why not? and (ii) find You’re Invited useful.

UPDATE: You can work around for the conflict by uninstalling MailTags, installing You’re Invited and activating it, and then installing MailTags again.

The current beta is freeware (expires 21 February) and available from John’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, outlook, ical, invitations, invites, applescript, mailtagsSimilar Posts: