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…

1. 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 (à la iTunes) and more — see the full changelog for all the improvements.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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• MailRecent updated and plugged at Macworld

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.

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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 .

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Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs uses the recent release of a Windows security patch to fire up the campaign to end HTML email.

He reminds his readers that “viewing your e-mail in anything other than plain text mode is asking for trouble on a Windows computer.”

He then proceeds to list some of the reasons why HTML should be avoided, including better protection against phishing attacks, avoiding “spam touting graphic images from adult Web sites” and not seeing your own HTML emails end up in someone else’s spam folder. (See a much more comprehensive list of reasons on the Free Anti Spam web site.)

Instructions are provided on using plain text in Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Opera. These might be useful for Hawk Wings readers in a distressing work environment.

Mail.app users have at least three ways to deal with incoming HTML emails—see an earlier Hawk Wings post, “Viewing HTML messages in Apple Mail“).

I am a fan of the first, most brutal option myself, but I am also a realist. See further King Canute (Wikipedia ).

UPDATE: Nicholas takes a different view . “Arguing that email users should not have access to different fonts or colours is much like arguing that they should still be using the word processors of 1987 as well,” he suggests.

[Thanks, Michael]

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Fans of Aaron Hanly’s Letterbox plugin, which redraws Mail.app’s interface to provide an “Outlook-style” preview pane on the right, will love a hack for Yojimbo that does the same thing.

Jon Hicks has created a modified nib file for Yojimbo’s interface that moves the preview pane to the right.

The shift involves some contraction of the Listview in the middle, but looks good:

This is Jon’s screenshot, ripped off with thanks

Jon provides some instructions for installing the new nib file. The involve digging around inside the app itself, but are not too daunting.

As Jon points out, it is a good idea to backup the existing OGMainWindow.nib file, in case you tire of the new look.

You can get the modified file and read the instructions on Jon’s web site .

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It’s not nice for Mac users to laugh at those who are less fortunate, but when the situation involves a intoxicating mix of Microsoft, email marketers and HTML email, the temptation becomes irresistible.

Outlook 2007 is making a change in the way that it renders HTML email. In the past it used the rendering engine in Internet Explorer, but now it is switching to the less fully-featured rendering engine in Word 2007.

According to Campaign Monitor, this is a disastrous step which “takes email design back 5 years”.

In particular, Outlook 2007 users will find the following things missing from their HTML emails:

1. No background images - Background images in divs and table cells are gone….
2. Poor background color support - Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
3. No support for float or position - Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
4. Shocking box model support - Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!

Campaign Monitor carries an image of how the same email laid out with CSS looks in Outlook 2000 and 2007:

Email marketers are steaming with rage . They will have to redesign all their HTML marketing templates as Office 2007 starts to spread through the corporate and home user markets.

In an interesting twist, some takes this as a tacit admission by Microsoft that the HTML engine in Internet Explorer 7 is still a security liability.

The most important thing Mail.app users can do about this is to keep themselves clean by resisting the Schadenfreude tsunami.

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