Here’s a nice story.

Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.

But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (”I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)

But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:

…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.

She found - and loves - MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.

And the end result?

I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.

Related posts

• WideMail 0.1.0: Real Widescreen Preview Column
• WideScreenMail plugin gets two-line preview
• Letterbox (widescreen plugin) for Leopard
• While I was busy…
• Sneak preview of the new Entourage 2008

Just when I thought I had posted enough for today, Andreas Amann releases a updated, Leopard-friendly version of his most excellent Mail Scripts.

Mail Scripts is a collection of eleven applescripts, bundled up in a user-friendly installer, which will remove duplicate messages in Mail.app, create rules from a selected email faster, archive messages, change SMTP servers on the fly, schedule emails for delivery later and much, much more.

They are now compatible with Leopard, although Andreas adds a note of caution about two of the scripts:

When sending messages other than text/plain (i.e., HTML messages and messages with attachments) using either the “Send all Drafts” or “Schedule Delivery” scripts, Mail might fail to actually send the message and present a dialog telling that the message failed to be sent using the server “null” - re-selecting the correct SMTP server will cause the message to be sent as intended. This seems to be a bug in Mail with the application forgetting the correct SMTP server settings which hopefully will be fixed in a future system upgrade.

Mail Scripts is donation-ware and available from Andreas’ web site . No mail user should be without them.

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• Remotely control your Mac via AppleScript
• Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates
• Mail Scripts gets even more leopardy
• How plugins turned an Entourage Girl into a Mail.app Fan
• You’re invited: Outlook meeting plugin for Mail

GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.

Related posts

• Fraser Speirs’ Growl AppleScript
• Ambient or layered notification in Mail.app
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• Get selective GrowlMail-like notifications

David Coffin has written a little applescipt that “mimics” the new mail notifications offered by GrowlMail.

When I first started using Mail.app, I loved the full-on “in your face” style of notifications offered by Mail.appetizer, GrowlMail and other apps. After a while I started to find them too distracting and stopped using them.

However, there are some emails that are worth getting distracted by — emails from your boss, from your partner, from your partner containing the words “This is your last chance”, PayPal notifications of donations to defray the running costs of Hawk Wings or whatever.

The alerts that the script generates look good. It even picks up my customised Mail stamp icon.

And because this is a script, you can attach it to a Mail rule that will alert you only when emails emails arrive that match those criteria (or more sensible ones of your own).

Setting it up is easy.

Just create a new rule in the Rules pane of Mail.app’s Preferences.

Set whatever conditions who want notifications for (the screenshot below will notify me of any email my boss sends me) and select “Run AppleScript” as the action.

Navigate to wherever you saved the script from David’s site, and select it.

All done.

Now I am much better placed to react quickly to anything my boss sends. So he knows that I am always focussed on his needs and not bunking off to write posts for Hawk Wings or playing Civ IV.

Sneaky, eh? Productivity at its best.

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• Mail.app rule to extract an email to a text file
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Supercharging Mail’s workflow with Automator
• Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick
• Script to send a Yojimbo item with Mail.app

The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.

Related posts

• Getting Things Done in Apple Mail
• Using Mail.app as a Yojimbo substitute
• Six tricks to get your email organised
• Script to archive mail.app messages by month
• Quickies: A Sunday brunch of Mail.app links

Excellent!

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