Christopher Breen at MacWorld has posted a tip for dealing with unwanted email from creeps and cranks using Mail.app‘s “Bounce” feature.

Using the “Bounce” feature on spam is a bad idea, but you can use it effectively against “email stalkers” or people who just can’t take a hint.

The tip shows you how to automate the bounce using an AppleScript attached to a rule.

Georg Klein has released updated versions of Mail2iCal (1.4) and Mail2iCalToDo (1.4), applescripts that will create an iCal event or ToDo from a message in Mail.app.

There doesn’t appear to be a changelog anywhere, but I am guessing that these new scripts are better than the old ones in several interesting and important ways.

UPDATE: And I guessed right. Georg posts in the comments:

1.4 adds a (limited) means for calendar designation: when run from a rule, the scripts will place the calendars in a calendar named after the rule, creating a new calendar if necessary. Since many users seem to use the scripts with Mail ActOn, the scripts try to determine the Mail ActOn prefix and delimiter, using only the last part of the rulename as calendar (e.g. “ActOn: e | Important” will lead to a calendar named Important). Manual execution is unchanged.

You can get the latest versions from Georg’s web site.

A poster in the kGTD discussion forum has written an AppleScript that will transfer the body of email into kGTD’s Inbox using a Mail Act-on rule.

kGTD is the excellent template developed by Ethan Schoonover for OmniOutliner Pro that implements the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) method of handling tasks and information.

I think kGTD is excellent. I have blogged about using it and Mail.app to get organised and get things done here and here.

Marco at CyBeRHQ.nl has written an AppleScript that will add To Dos to iCal via a Mail.app message.

Simply compile and save the script on his site. Attach it to an Apple Mail rule set to match (see below).

Email yourself the task to be added, and Mail.app will run the script, using the subject of the message as the title of the To Do and dumping the body of the email into the Notes.

For security reasons, it might be wise to set the conditions of the rule to include not only a subject beginning with “TODO: ” but also a “From” condition matching your own email address.

Works a treat!

So many notification options exist for Apple Mail — “loud” ones like iAlert or MailAppetizer, discreet ones like MailUnreadStatusBar, spoken ones like the Announce Mail or Spoken Sender Applescripts — that it is possible to overlook Mail’s built-in notification features.

Mail.app can announce new mail with an audio file that you can configure yourself in the General tab of the Preferences pane.

It can also let you know that new mail has arrived by bouncing its icon in the Dock. You can easily activate this by setting up this rule:

Apple Mail doesn’t have a rule condition called “Message is not Junk” that would prevent the icon bouncing for Junk. If you know how to do this in a smarter way, let me know.

If the sight of anything at all bouncing in the Dock annoys you, you can disable attention-seeking icon bouncing permanently with Insanity’s free Dock Detox haxie, which requires Insanity’s APE to run.bonucing icon, dock, apple mail, mail.app, notification, rule