Secrets, a clever little System Preference Pane that makes tweaking “hidden” features of Mac OS X easy (see earlier Hawk Wings post for more), has been updated to 1.0.6 and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.

Secrets provides easy assess to many of Mac Os X’s settings that you can otherwise only change by messing around in Terminal with long command strings, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It includes tweaks for many Mac core and a wide range of third-party apps. The most popular tweaks across all the apps are listed separately as well.

Of course, here we are most interested in its options for Mail.app:

Secrets Mail Preferences

As you can see from the screenshot, Secrets allows you to

• specify a default BCC email address
• force Mail to display messages in plain text
• set the Bundle compatibility and enable bundles
• enable and disable the data detectors
• switch the new (annoying) Snow Leopard behaviour of including names in copied email addresses on and off
• set a sent mail sound
• specify a minimum for HTML messages and a preferred text encoding
• request read receipts
• set the interval for refreshing Mail’s RSS feeds
• Decide whether to display attachments inline or not.

And more.

Some people will think of it as a hack and might be wary. However it comes with the reassurance that Alcor, the developer also (once) behind Quicksilver, is its creator. That’s a strong pedigree.

Secrets is freeware and available from the Blacktree web site .

UPDATE: I read on TUAW that the Blacktree site is overloaded. Secrets is also available from the app’s page on code.google.com. secrets, preferences, hidden preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, tweaks, tips, bundles

After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.

Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver , Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.

It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:

Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:

Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.

The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.

The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:

Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.

Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.

Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.

Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page . quicksilver, secrets, preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, productivity, tweaks

rooSwitch Lite offers multiple profiles for most of Mac OS X’s iApps including Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail.app, Safari and Stickies.

As the developer Brian Cooke explains:

rooSwitch makes it easy to keep your favorite apps data safe and also makes it easy to manage profiles for different situations. A good example of this is are “at home” and “at work” profiles.

rooSwitch Lite is the freeware, restricted version of rooSwitch (shareware, USD 14.95). It doesn’t have the range of apps that the shareware version offers or the Automator and AppleScript support, but it does offer unlimited profiles and fast switching between them.

In addition to keeping home and work settings separate, rooSwtich’s profiles are great for beta-testers and developers who need to work with multiple preference and application support files.

Brian has made a movie which demonstrates the app in action and another movie of the shareware version gives additional tips on how to use the app to maximum advantage.

rooSwitch Lite is freeware and available from Brian’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, productivity, profiles, preferences, Safari

.Mac allows you to use numerous aliases with your .Mac email account, but offers no facility for creating a unique user name for each. They are seem to come from the user name of the main address.

Andreas Amann (Mail Scripts developer) has posted an AppleScript on macOSXHints that lets you add a specific user name for each alias.

Two things: Back up your Mail.app preferences (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist) first and make sure that you have quit Mail.app before you run the script..Mac, dotmac, applescript, mail.app, apple mail, aliases, preferences

A poster on the macOSXHints forum wants to know how he can delete all the account information, emails and files that Mail.app uses, so that he can use Thunderbird in peace without wasting disk space.

He is told that he needs to delete the ~/Library/Mail folder. That’s the biggest disk hog, but it is not the only one.

In 10.4.x, Mail.app also sometimes stores attachments in a folder called (by default) ~/Library/Mail Downloads. You could kill that to save some space.

If you are in the mood, why not carry on and delete the Preferences file (com.apple.mail.plist) which stores all your account settings and so on. It’s in your ~/Library/Preferences folder.

For the final purge, you could delete Mail.app itself (46.8 MB) from the Applications folder. A desperately sad business.mail.app, apple mail, deleting, mail folder, attachments, preferences

Quicksilver promotes itself with the tag, “Everything is an Easter egg”. There’s a surprise behind every keystroke.

I was surprised a few months ago when I discovered how easy it is to email a file directly from the Quicksilver interface.

And, of course, it’s just as easy to select an Address Book contact and fire up an email message to them in Mail.app with a few Quicksilver keystrokes.

But other email clients and interfaces get good loving from Quicksilver too.

Quicksilver and Gmail

A new Quicksilver plugin for Gmail was released today.

Coelomic at WordWorks has produced an excellent tutorial for Gmailers who “would rather die than use Mail in OS X” on how to use the plugin.

Detailed and lavishly screenshotted, it shows you how to compose and address an email inside Quicksilver that will load into Gmail’s web interface.

Gmail and Thunderbird

Hawk Wings reader and prolific commenter, Ted Pavlic, posted the keystroke sequence to begin an email in Thunderbird from the Quicksilver interface. Let me save you the leg work:

Set Thunderbird as your default e-mail app, hit Control-Space, type in a name from your address book, tab over, type “Compose,” and Thunderbird will pop up in a compose window with that e-mail address.

The comma trick works too. Control-Space, name, comma, name, comma, name, comma, …, tab, compose, and Thunderbird will pop up an e-mail addressed to each of those address book entries.

Of course, this isn’t really “Thunderbird support” in Quicksilver.

Quicksilver can begin a message in any email client that you can set as the default in the General tab of Mail.app’s preferences. Even PowerMail.email, file, Quicksilver, Gmail, Thunderbird, plugin, web interface, mail.app, preferences

This quick little hack adds “Apply”, “Cancel” and “OK” buttons to the bottom of every pane in Mail.app‘s Preferences.

With these buttons added, you no longer need to close Preferences or switch panes in order to save your changes.

By default, a Preference pane looks like this:

To add the buttons,

1. Quit Mail
2. Navigate to Mail.app in your Applications folder, Control-Click on it and select “Show Package Contents”
3. Inside the Finder window that then opens, double-click on the Contents and then the Resources folders.
4. Open the PreferencesPanels.plist file with a text editor like TextEdit or with the Property List Editor if you have the Developer Tools installed.
5. Find the “UseButtons” string and change its value from 0 to 1. Then save.

Close everything again and open Apple Mail. You will see that your Preference Panes now look like this:

Handy!