Hawk Wings » rules

How plugins turned an Entourage Girl into a Mail.app Fan

Tim Gaden — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:37:03 +0000

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.

switching, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, entourage, outlook, plugins, rules, smart mailboxesSimilar Posts:

Mail Scripts updated for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:00:43 +0000

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.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, mail scripts, applescript, archive, rules, duplicates, pluginsSimilar Posts:

Missing GrowlMail in Leopard? The workaround

Tim Gaden — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:50:32 +0000

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.mail.app, apple mail, growl, notification, tips, applescript, rulesSimilar Posts:

Get selective GrowlMail-like notifications

Tim Gaden — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:39:56 +0000

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.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, applescript, notifications, growlmail, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

Five tutorials on using Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:28:36 +0000

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.mail.app, apple mail, rules, productivity, mail act-on, tutorial, tips, sorting, folders, imapSimilar Posts:

Christmas cheer: No image spam for me

Tim Gaden — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:05:00 +0000

Excellent!mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam

Tim Gaden — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:30:36 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints has described a rule designed to block the current plague of image-bearing spam.

It’s an improvement, perhaps, on the image spam catching rule I posted three months ago.

Having read the post and the suggestion in the comments, I’ve tweaked my rule for this a bit.

It now looks like this:

Most of the image spam I get contains a GIF file.

I like the idea of setting the colour to a particular colour so that I can see at a glance which messages the rule has moved. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling and it helps me to scan quickly for false positives. mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk, image spam, cads and bounders, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

IMAPCheck: Plugin for server-side mailboxes

Tim Gaden — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:42:21 +0000

Daniel Bingham has written a plugin that fixes a particular problem with Mail.app’s IMAP support.

IMAPCheck corrects Mail.app’s habit of not seeing email that has been moved into IMAP subfolders by server-side rules until you actually open the subfolder.

Instead, it forces Mail to do a full sync every time, which will increase the traffic between your IMAP server and your Mac, but will also pick up emails that you might not otherwise see.

This plugin differs from IMAP-IDLE, a plugin that creates support in Mail for IMAP’s IDLE feature.

With IMAP-IDLE installed, Mail knows about email arriving in your inbox right away. IMAPCheck lets you know about email that has arrived and been moved into another IMAP folder.

IMAPCheck comes with one limitation:

It still does not enable rules support on IMAP accounts. This bundle WILL allow Mail.app to see the new email, but it still doesn’t process rules in those folders. I looked briefly into enabling rules on these folders, but it seems to be something built directly into POP Account support.

I don’t have any server-side rules myself, but those who do will be glad of this new option.

It’s donation-ware and you can get it from Daniel’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, imap, server side, rules, mailboxes, folders, pluginsSimilar Posts:

Mail.app rule to extract an email to a text file

Tim Gaden — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:57:26 +0000

On the Apple Discussion Boards, a poster called Cyclosaurus has provided an applescript which when activated by a rule in Mail.app will save an email to a plain text file on the Desktop.

This could be very handy.

To use it, all you need to do is copy the text from his posting (above), paste it into Script Editor, compile it and save it off as a script in some memorable place (I find that ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/ Mail is memorable).

Then you need to hook it up to a Mail rule. Here I am using it to extract bibliographical records of books for importing into Bookends or EndNote, two reference managers for academic writing.

The rule recognises the subject line that the library adds to these emails, extracts the info to a plain text file on the Desktop called slash.txt, tags it with the MailTags project for my work and dumps it into my mail archive. (A quick subject line search for “MARC record” will find them all again, so a rabbit warren of mailboxes is not required.)

The end result is a clean plain text file. The script appends any subsequently extracted emails to the end of the file:

This is unfortunately a hypothetical example. In real life I am not that organised or automated.

However, it gives you an idea of the applications to which the script could be put. Gathering a list of to-dos perhaps or saving a plain text copy of every email from your sweetheart. Or from a cyber-stalker. Or if set to “every message”, a full plain text archive of all the email you receive. Or to save a copy of every email that mentions Steve Jobs. Or whatever. mail.app, apple mail, rules, applescript, productivity, plain text, extract, email, tipsSimilar Posts:

Image spam surge powered by Russian bot-net

Tim Gaden — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:20:49 +0000

Reports on eWeek.com and on SearchSecurity.com claim that a highly sophisticated Russian bot-net is pumping out the current surge in image spam.

According to a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, the bot-netters grew their 70,000 strong zombie network with the SpamThru trojan, an innovative piece of malware which not only packs its own pirated version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus to eradicate any competing malware from infected computers, but also uses a list of proxy servers to evade blacklisting by anti-spam agencies.

The researcher also claims to have uncovered evidence that the spammers harvested lists of email addresses from financial institutions:

It also appears the spammer made an effort to obtain more targeted lists of email addresses by hacking into smaller investment news Web sites and other e-businesses and downloading their user databases,” he said. “This is likely due to the fact that pump-and-dump stock spam seems to be a primary motive of the botnet.

Mail.app users can get some level of protection by creating a rule to filter some of these images spams out.

David Reitter takes a slightly different approach with a different rule.

Fastmail users (and others with tweakable server-side spam protection) may get some extra relief from this tip on EmailDiscussions.com which creates a more sophisticated rule.

[Via Daring Fireball ]mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, email, bot-net, trojanSimilar Posts: