After switching to mail.app from Thunderbird, the blogger at 48-Hour Days found that that she (or he) couldn’t live without Thunderbird’s F8 keyboard shortcut for showing and hiding the Preview Pane.

As everyone knows, you can show or hide it in Apple Mail by double-clicking the small dot in the separator between the Mail Viewer and the Preview Pane — Apple’s Technote shows you how.

But if that is not quick enough for you, 48-Hour Days provides an applescript that will automate the process and which can be bound to a Quicksilver trigger or FastScript’s shortcut.

Only hardcore keyboard fanatics will want to use this, but there are people like that out there, and this post is for them. mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, keyboard shortcuts, applescript, preview pane, tips

Bruce Phillips and Qwerty Denzel have written an AppleScript that solves one of the most frequently emailed complaints about Mail.app that I receive—how to move by keyboard shortcut to the next unread message.

I usually tell them that the Spacebar is as good as it gets.

However, using this script combined with an app like FastScripts , you can cycle through your unread messages in the Preview pane more efficiently.

It won’t satisfy those who want to do this in the Message window like they once did in Eudora, but you can’t have everything.

[Via Daring Fireball ]applescript, mail.app, apple mail, unread messages, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, preview pane

The clever guys at Wishingline Design Studio have created five AppleScripts to switch views quickly in Mail.app.

The scripts— Show All Messages, Show Flagged Messages, Show Unread Messages Only, Toggle Preview Pane, and Toggle Image Viewing—offer quick ways to control what you see in Mail.app’s interface, even quicker if you launch them with Quicksilver triggers or with FastScripts.

The scripts are in the AppleScript section of a whole page of nifty and useful distractions on the Wishingline web site.applescript, mail.app, apple mail, message view, preview pane, image viewing, flagged messages

Screenshots have been floating around for a while with mockups of a three-paned Mail.app à la Outlook.

But now there is a hack that actually works.

A member of the Ars Technica Open Forum, Mithras, has posted a hacked binary of Mail.app, which displays the preview screen on the right, giving Mail a “widescreen” form factor.

And it actually works:

Click image for a full-sized view

Mithras’ binary has a different name (MailWidescreen) so you can copy it into your Applications folder without fear of overwriting your default copy (although backing up is always, always wise. UPDATE: Always!). Then just open the one you want each time.

Unfortunately, you cannot yet manually resize the middle column, although Mithras promises a fix for this within the week.

There is however a work-around. The middle pane of the hack takes its size from the depth of the Message List in your normal copy of Mail.

So, if the middle column is too small, open your default copy of Mail.app and increase the depth of the Message List. Then the middle screen in MailWidescreen will be correspondingly wider. Make it wider than you want. Then it will reduce to the width you actually want as you resize the whole window from the bottom right.

You can read the whole thread on the Ars Technica Openforum or cut to the chase and… download the binary.

UPDATE: Mithras works fast. He has now packaged it in the form of a classic Mail.app bundle , which you can drop into your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles folder where MailTags, Mail Act-on, Mail.appetizer and the rest live. And just as easily take it out again. Extra bonus: the middle column can now be manually re-sized as normal.

[Thanks, Nick]mail.app, apple mail, hacks, three panes, Outlook, preview pane, widescreen, Apple GUI, tips

It is impossible to go away from a post by Pierre Igot at Betalogue without learning something new. Two recent post are no exception.

He details several shortcomings in the way that Mail presents the user interface for threaded messages and in the method it uses to auto-select a first message to display when any given thread is expanded.

A second post expands on the problems , especially how keyboard shortcuts operate in normal and threaded views.

Several of the issues arise because of the way in which Pierre likes to use Mail:

I use Mail with the so-called “message area” pane closed. In other words, my main mail viewer window in Mail consists of the mailbox list on the left-hand side and the message list on the right-hand side. I don’t have a third pane at the bottom displaying the contents of the currently selected message. I don’t like that, because when that “message area” pane is visible, any message in the message list becomes marked as read as soon as you select it, whether you actually want to read it or not.

People who use Mail in the same way will find the second post especially interesting.betalogue, mail.app, apple mail, keyboard shortcuts, bugs, threading, messages, preview pane

A month ago Joshua Bryant posted a mock-up of Mail.app with an Outlook / Entourage preview pane on the right.

Scott Dunlap sends in another mock-up:

Click for the full-sized image.

He writes of Joshua’s: “I think he made it too Entourage-like by making messages 2 lines. That’s probably needed for laptop usage, but this is what I want.”

Which one would you prefer if — entirely hypothetically — a clever developer were thinking of producing a hack to do this? Or would you not touch either one with a ten-foot pole?mail.app, apple mail, hacks, interface, GUI, entourage, outlook, preview pane, mock-up

Joshua Bryant has mocked up a image on flickr which shows how Mail.app would look if it featured Outlook’s full-length preview pane on the right.

Looks very sweet to me.

[Via a sidenote on hicksdesign.co.uk]mail.app, apple mail, preview pane, Outlook, Apple GUI