Mail Badger offers users the ability to set more than one new mail badge on Mail.app’s Dock icon.

It is cheaper and more flexible than DockStar, although the eye-candy is not quite as well developed.

Mail Badger installs itself as a bundle in your ~/Mail/Bundles folder. (Uninstalling it again is as easy as deleting the Mail Badger.mailbundle file from that folder.)

Once installed, new badges are created in Mail Badger’s preference pane within Mail’s Preferences:

Options are provided for the shape of the new badge (spiky or smooth circle, star or heart, or you can add your own images), its size and colour and for the size of the text on each badge. You can also choose where to place it on Mail’s Stamp icon.

The count for each new badge is controlled by the user-customizable rules that operate very much like the Mail’s native rules. Here is the combination that gives me instant notice of the new mail from my wife in a pink love heart:

Beautiful!

New mail from my boss also strikes my eye at once with a black star badge:

You can probably think of even better uses for the extra mail badges in your own context.

You can also use Mail Badger as an easy way of changing the existing single “spiky circle” mail badge, giving it a different shape, size or colour.

Mail Badger is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, notification, dock, badges, roll your own, tips, plugins

Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, badges, Dock, mail.app, notification, plugins, roll your own

Postcards is an utility that lets you roll your own postcards or e-cards and send them easily with Mail.app.

To get started all you need to do is drop an image from your iPhoto library (or from anywhere for that matter) onto the app’s main window.

You can resize and reposition it, add a message in the pane to the right (adjust the font and text size to suit), and then add a stamp to the top of the postcard:

You can add a stamp from the library that comes with the app in the slide-out drawer on the right, or you can double-click on the stamp on the postcard.

You then get the chance to make your own stamp, using the built-in stamp editor:

Even the postmark can be customised.

When the postcard is finished, ⇧-⌘-A opens it up in a new Mail.app message, ready to go.

The developer also provides a zip file of handwriting fonts to add that extra touch of hand-crafted realism.

In an extra nice touch, the app can capture an image from an iSight camera. Since mine is built-in into the top of the screen, I can grab an image of wherever I am and send it.

In minutes you can knock up a postcard to a loved one or a swanky promo for your pet project:

Postcards is shareware (USD 10) and available from the developer’s web site . You can try before you buy, but the postcards are watermarked “unlicenced” until you pay.

[Thanks, Anthony!]mail.app, apple mail, postcards, ecards, photos, iPhoto, roll your own, plugins, addons, anti-productivity, iSight, George Bush

Tags: addons, anti-productivity, Apple Mail, ecards, George Bush, iphoto, isight, mail.app, photos, plugins, postcards, roll your own

Richard Valk maintains a set of step-by-step instructions for making your Mac into a full-blown web, mail and more server.

Today he has released a walk-through for adding dspam , an open-source spam and content filtering system to the mix.

So now, following his guide, you will not only end up with:

a Mac which you can use to host your and your friends web sites by using an Apache2-based web server which uses PHP 5 and can talk with a MySQL 5 database. This means you can install most PHP/MySQL based applications like for instance blogs or forums like WordPress and phpbb. You are also able to provide mail services for them with unlimited mailboxes, domains and web-based email services using Roundcube.

But it will be spam-free as well (well, 99.5-99.95% spam-free is all dspam actually claims).

Nice. email, isp, mail server, web server, roll your own, apache, PHP/MySQL, dspam, roll your own ISP

Tags: apache, dspam, email, isp, mail server, PHP/MySQL, roll your own, roll your own ISP, web server