1. Automatically mark emails needing a reply: A poster on macOSXHints describes how to set up a rule that will automatically mark incoming emails requesting a reply. Easily adaptable to other uses.
2. Catch image spam: A new brand of image-based spam can outfox Mail.app’s junk filter. Luckily, an easy-to-construct rule will stop it in its tracks again.
3. Remotely schedule torrent downloads: Matt Comi shows you how to construct a rule that will automatically strip out a torrent that you email to yourself and pass it to Azureus to begin the download. Bittorrenting from work without guilt or fear!
4. Control your home Mac remotely: Attached to a mail.app rule, this applescript can automate a select number of tasks when prompted by emails with the right keywords. A couple of apps make this even easier to set up.
5. AppleScripted Auto-replies: Michelle Steiner has written an applescript that will generate auto-replies when attached to a Mail.app rule. Macresponder does the same thing with more options but costs money.

mail.app, apple mail. tips, applescript, rules, remote control, spam, reply, productivity, torrent

Tags: apple mail tips, applescript, mail.app, Productivity, remote control, reply, rules, spam, torrent

Not long ago Daniel Jalkut discovered that Dashboard calls home to Apple to check for widget updates. Today I discovered that Mail.app does the same thing.

Recently at my real work but not at home, Mail has been hanging for 30 seconds to a minute each time I tried to reply to an email. I would hit the Reply button and have time to make a cup of coffee in the kitchenette before the reply window appeared.

Luckily, the network administrator at the College, Tim Bell, has god-like tcpdump powers. He uncovered what was happening.

Each time I reply to a message, Mail attempts to contact an Apple server through port 80. That’s not a problem at home, but it is at work, where port 80 is blocked and a proxy redirects all HTTP traffic through another port. Mail didn’t respect my proxy settings. It carried on regardless with a process that eventually failed after lengthy delay.

Tim opened the port so that we could see what Mail was trying to do.

Mail was sending the following request based on my .Mac username to certinfo.mac.com (17.250.248.148):

GET /lookup?timgaden HTTP/1.1

In response, it was getting:

The third line in base64 decodes to G\x92\x06\x1777V\xd6W2 (where \x?? means the non-ascii character 92 (in hex), etc.) – so Tim tells me – and the fourth line to acceptance (with a trailing space).

Once we understood the problem, we could google for an answer. It turns out that Jonathan Wight experienced the same thing a year ago. He also provides a fix: delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist preferences file.

I’m not suggesting that anything nefarious or underhand is happening here, but it still puzzles me on three fronts.

First, what exactly is it checking and what is the undecipherable response? Is it checking my iChat certificate?

Secondly, why should Mail try to do this when I am replying to a message in my work account on my work server?

Thirdly, why is Mail so stupid? What design oversight makes it overlook my system-wide proxy settings and carry on banging away at port 80, giving me endless delays? Normally, Mail.app helps me to get things done, but not here.

UPDATE: MacGeekery has posted an interesting take on this, which is worth a read.

I hope I made it clear in my post above – although perhaps I didn’t – that I do not think Apple is stealing my credit card information or looking for cracked software or turning my computer into a drone for Apple press releases or doing anything else untoward.

I do think it is puzzling that my proxy settings were ignored and that Mail.app was thus unusable for up to a minute everytime I tried to reply to a message. I do think it is puzzling that the fix was so hard to find. I do think it is fair to expect better of Apple than this.

[Thanks for your help this afternoon, Tim. All my tcpdump are belong to you.]mail.app, apple mail, security, certificates, port 80, reply, hanging, spinning beachball of death, bug, proxy

Tags: Apple Mail, bug, certificates, hanging, mail.app, port 80, proxy, reply, security, spinning beachball of death

One feature that many people miss in Apple Mail is the ability to request and answer return receipts.

People with Panther Mail can use MailPriority. For Tiger Mail users, there is an all-or-nothing solution that involves a Terminal hacking. It adds a return receipt request to all your emails.

The only other option for requesting receipts is a third-party service like ReadNotify. (Not a bad idea if you only need them now and then).

But now there is a way to answer the return receipts that others send to you. Joel Nelson has posted an AppleScript which automatically replies to return receipts sent to you by people who use mail clients that support it (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc). The message it generates looks like this:

Download the script and save it somewhere memorable. You will need to browse to it when setting up the rule that runs the script. Follow the instructions on Joel’s site.

You will very probably need to add a “Disposition-Notification-To” header to the list of conditions in Mail.app’s rule menu. Select the Edit header option:

Then click the plus sign on the next window and type “Disposition-Notification-To” so that it looks like this:

Now Apple Mail will automatically reply through the rule to any emails that request a read receipt.

Personally, I don’t miss them. There’s nothing more annoying than people asking you if you have received their message while you are reading it. But I don’t live in a corporate environment. In business some people have an expectation that you will acknowledge their emails in this way, and now with this script you can.reply, receipts, applescript, terminal hack, Tiger Mail, Panther Mail, email

Tags: applescript, email, panther mail, receipts, reply, terminal hack, Tiger Mail