Chris Landon emails with a reasonable request, something you don’t miss or even think about until someone else mentions it.

He points out one thing that Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do, and that’s coloured mailboxes.

He writes:

Do you know if there’s such a plug-in, etc, for color coding a folder? I have over a hundred folders an it makes it difficult to get to a specific folder, quickly. I could have created more sub-folders than the bunch I already have, but this does not help my situation either.

Here’s an example (I was using Thunderbird at the time and it does not have it either)…

Would it also be difficult to write a plug-in for this?

I don’t know of a plugin that does this, nor do I know how difficult it would be to code, but my hunch is a lot of people would use it. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, mozilla, mailboxes, colours, labels, plugin

Logan Rockmore’s excellent menubar notification utility, Mail Unread Menu has been updated and now offers much more control for users over the mailboxes it will track.

Mail Unread Menu works with Leopard (which will be handy) and also features a new exclusions list in its preferences where you can specific mailboxes for the app to ignore.

This is a concentration boost of the first order. For example, in the screenshot below, I have added the mailboxes for two mailing lists:

Because Mail Unread now ignores, it only reports emails that might actually need a response from me, not emails that prefer to browse when it suits me.

Mail Unread Menu is donation-ware and available from Logan’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, menubar, notification, plugin, unread messages, productivity

How I haven’t seen this before, I don’t know.

Do It (formerly known as ToDo) is a very nifty, tricked-out task or to-do management app that features everything but the kitchen sink — Address Book integration, Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more.

In the app’s readme file, the developer describes it as “a small application to manage categorized to do lists. Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a web site, or a contact from your address book. The linked file or URL can be opened directly from the Do It window.”

The interface is nicely done.

Clicking the orange arrows moves from one category (or Context for GTDers) list to the next, and items within each are ordered by priority.

If an item has a file or URL linked to it, clicking the small arrow on the right jumps to the file or web page.

Double-clicking the item’s title allows it to be edited. To edit other details of the item, you need to click the “i” button at the bottom or use ⌘-I:

The details are stored in a “MailTags-like” smoked glass pane.

Hovering the cursor over “To Do …” slides down a Notes field and the “Deadline …” (not visible here because it is expanded already) opens up options to add reminders for the task in iCal, use an alarm and something called “Auto upgrade priority”.

I couldn’t work out what that last options does, but it sounds pretty cool.

Dragging a file from Finder or a URL from your browser over the Linked Item box stores it with the task. Here you see the URL of Do It’s web site, but it could just as easily be the TextMate draft of the post.

Do It is designed to be skinned and the developer maintains a list of user-submitted skins:

Quicksilver nuts like me will love the fact that the developer has written a Quicksilver plugin for Do It.

Install it from the Do It menu, quit and relaunch Quicksilver and creating to-do is just a Quicksilver activation keystroke away:

After hitting return, a supplementary dialog appears allowing you to assign the new to-do to the category or context or your choice:

In another nice piece of integration, Do It comes with an Address Book plugin which offers contextual menu options to set reminders to email or phone people in your Address Book:

A similar additional screen lets the reminder be assigned to the category of your choice.

Syncing with .Mac options are controlled within the app’s Preferences.

As if all of that is not unbelievable enough, Do It is freeware.

You can get a copy of it from the developer’s web site .not apple mail, productivity, ical, to-dos, task management, quicksilver, syncing, address book, plugin, Jeepers this is slick

Greg Welch, creator of the MailFollowup plugin for smarter email conversations, has added a second title to his plugin stable.

MailRecent provides a quick filing solution for Mail.app.

It adds three new menus — “Copy to Recent”, “Move to Recent”, and “Go to Recent” — to Apple Mail. Each of these contains dynamically-updated lists of recently used mailboxes:

The number of mailboxes listed in the menus is controlled by the “Number of Recent Items” setting for Documents in the Appearance panel of the OS X System Preferences.

By default MailRecent sorts the mailboxes alphabetically, but Greg provides instructions for some Terminal commands to sort them by time or frequency of use.

One small thing. The plugin only lists the name of the mailbox. So, for example, if you have three accounts each with an “Archive” mailbox, you will not be able to tell from the list which one is which.

UPDATE: Greg emails to say that this kind of ambiguity shouldn’t arise. The Usage section on the plugin’s page says that, “If you transfer to one or more mailboxes that happen to have the same name, the menu item titles will be extended with a minimal distinguishing path to the mailbox. This is true whether the “duplicate” mailboxes (same names) are in the same or different mail accounts.” The extension doesn’t appear for me, but it might be there for you. It works for Greg.

Personally, I use Mail Act-on for my filing, but this provides another neat solution to getting mail out of your inbox and where it belongs quickly.

MailRecent is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugin, filing, productivity, mailboxes, sorting, mail act-on

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 . mail.app, apple mail, widescreen, letterbox, plugin, hack, outlook, yojimbo

A plugin for iPhoto exists that extends the range of email clients you can use to email photos from iPhoto, but nothing so far plugs that gap for webmail services.

Juan Leon stepped up to the challenge. He has produced an iPhoto plugin that uses Gmail to send photos.

After you install the package, you will find a new pane in iPhoto’s Export menu (File > Export in iPhoto 6, Share > Export in iPhoto 5):

The only possible pitfall here are the options for sizing the images. If the image you want to send is less than 800 pixels in width or height, the plugin enlarges it to that size. In that case, just select “Send original”.

Juan says that the plugin “is still a very early piece of software, probably has many bugs, and is rough around the edges”. I emailed a dozen photos of varying size and format tonight and it seems to work fine.

The resulting emails look good:

He welcomes constructive criticism at the email address you can find on his web page where you will also find the plugin, which is donationware.gmail, iphoto, email, photos, exporting, sharing, plugin, google

The Quicksilver plugin for Yojimbo was updated today.

In the absence of any release notes, one can only guess what might have changed. Having to guess like this is part of Quicksilver’s charm generally, so here goes…

It introduced something which is either new or at least new to me: an “Append Text (makes plaintext)” option specific to Yojimbo rather than the generic Text Manipulations action.

This allows you to select an item in Yojimbo and append some plain text to it, for example quickly to add to a list of books that I need to borrow when next at the library:

Obviously, this especially nice for people who use Yojimbo as a hub for “Getting Things Done” (GTD) or for managing a series of plain text to-do lists.

If this feature has been there all the time and I just haven’t seen it, someone will no doubt let me know.

UPDATE: As some readers have noted in the comments, I should have mentioned that you will need to turn the action on in Quicksilver’s preferences. Go to Preferences > Actions and search for “text”. Then check the box to the left of the action in the list. Then refresh. Then enjoy:

yojimbo, quicksilver, gtd, getting things done, append text, plugin, not apple mail, productivity