Scott Morrison has released an updated version of Mail Act-On, a plugin that quickly files and flags Mail.app messages.

It is incredibly useful. It holds the number two spot in the “Top ten things every mail.app user should have” and is mentioned more than any other plugin in the “Talking Mail.app” interview series.

The new version (1.3.2) is a universal plugin, now offering Act-On goodness for the new Intel-based Macs as well.

It also contains a small bugfix. Rules that are disabled in Preferences will no longer show up in the Act-On Menu.

Mail Act-On is donation-ware and is available from Scott’s web site . Scott also maintains a page of tips for getting the most out of Mail Act-On.

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Here is the first of an email interview series with developers, bloggers and others on Apple Mail and how they use it…..

Scott Morrison has an M. A. in Educational Technology and teaches Computer Sciences at a high school in Montreal. In the evenings, he tries to transform himself into a developer of Mail plug-ins.

His first Mac was the original Mac 128k in 1984, and he has been a die hard Mac user since. His current rig includes a Powerbook G4 -500 and an iMac intel duo-Core 1.83. He loves a good scotch and in his other spare time makes beer and mead.

Mail Act-On and MailTags are his first forays into Cocoa/Objective C programming (and probably the most ambitious and widely-used of all the Mail.app plugins).

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

SM: Off and on since OS 10.0, but exclusively since January 2005. I’ve used Entourage which I found slow (Office 2001) and too “Microsofty”, and Thunderbird, which was a great client, but a little buggy in bits and not fully integrated in to the OS X environment (such as Spotlight and addressbook).

I made the switch back to Mail because I was looking forward to using Spotlight and Smart Mailfolders. Once I started developing plug-ins, I kept eating my own dog food. I also use First Class Client but that is only for work.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

(more…)

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Everyone’s talking about it, so why not join in? Mail Act-on is everyone’s plug-in of the moment. Reviews on 43 Folders, MacOSXHints, About.com, Amit Gupta’s Blog and MacWorld rave about the time it saves and the neatness it brings to your inbox.

Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do - moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.

Some reviewers recommend combining its use with a “Respond-Action-Hold-Waiting-Archive” schema of folders for sorting mail and getting über-efficient. That’s not for me. I soon forget about the emails I moved into the Action folder, or worry about which of the folders a particular email should be in. But even without this extra step, my inbox is smaller and I deal with things faster.

Mail Act-on is free, although the creator, Scott Morrison, accepts donations. You can download it from his web site.

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