A poster on macOSXHints notes that Leopard Mail now supports Spotlight sophistication in its searches.

This means that you can use a limited set of operators to construct more complex and better-targeted searches than you ever could before. Spotlight in Leopard can filter results by metadata categories like “author:” or “date:”. Leopard Mail does the same thing.

For example, this search lets me quickly find all the emails sent from a Christ Church South Yarra email address that contain the word “beer”. Not as many as one might think! Still, the search enables me to find quickly that the answer is Boags.

Another search from work yesterday quickly finds all the emails from the Director of Communications at College which contain the word “font”. Without too much browsing I discover that Optima is the approved font for all external communications and can get on with actually writing one.

A third example. This search lists all the emails that have arrived since 3 December that mention Tiger, including the one from a Hawk Wings reader who wonders why I don’t post about Tiger Mail anymore.

Not everything about Leopard Mail is focussed on greater productivity, but this smarter way of digging through your email and finding what you are looking for is a great leap forward.

After a few posts carping on about this or that failing in Mail.app, it’s good to stumble on something like this and remember what a truly great email client it is.

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Google has launched a Mac version of its Desktop search app.

Windows users have been able to use this for a while now as a kind of poor man’s Spotlight. Now it comes to Mac and brings with it several tricks that Spotlight can’t do. Hardcore Googlistas will love it.

As you would expect, it is able to search your drives for applications, files, emails and folders. But unlike Spotlight, it is also able to search your Gmail messages and web browsing history at the same time.

Desktop for Mac installs itself as a system-wide Preference Pane, where you can set the app’s options, including whether or not to include Gmail and your web-browsing history in the search results:

Another pane allows you to set the hotkey for Google Desktop (⌘ + ⌘ by default) and to determine how results are displayed.

Hitting the hotkey calls up a nicely-crafted search box. A search for “journo” lists emails from Mail.app and Gmail in one hit which is very handy, complete with a little snippet for each one, something I often wish Spotlight could provide:

In an extra nice touch for MailTags users like me, Google has made sure that the app is compatible with existing mdimporters. That means it recognises MailTags keywords, projects and notes and displays them in the results.

You can download Google Desktop for Mac from Google’s Mac software page .

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Microsoft is recommending that that employers increase the size of Exchange mailboxes, as it moves to head off the increasing trend among workers to auto-forward their email to more expansive Gmail accounts.

Other new features in Exchange 2007 also take aim at Gmail’s search and mobile-access features.

Dan Warne at APC Magazine reports that,

IT departments have traditionally applied such restrictive limits to Exchange Server mailboxes -as low as 25MB per staff member - that users have become frustrated with repeated “your mailbox is full” errors.

Meanwhile, only senior execs have been granted access to work email from home, or via a Blackberry.

As a result, more and more users are auto-forwarding all their email to Gmail, where they have a 2.7GB mailbox capacity and can access it wherever they are - even via a mobile phone.

Microsoft hopes that larger mailboxes will stem the flood.

It will also offer a search feature 35 times faster than Exchange 2003 and plans to release a mobile-access app for Exchange, code-named “Crossbow”, which will offer remote searching of, and quick access to, Exchange mail.

Not everyone is a lucky as me. The IT Department where I work would rather carve their own hearts out with an Apple Remote than run Exchange. It also provides bottomless mailboxes.

If you are really interested in what the new Exchange 2007 will be like, or if your workplace forces you to use it, you can see some demos of the new features on Microsoft’s web site.

You can also look forward to Microsoft’s promise that,

Exchange Server 2007 was designed from the ground up to enable your IT department to deliver bold new communication capabilities - voice-controlled inboxes, Outlook-based voice mail - without sacrificing productivity or compromising budgets.

[Via APC Magazine ]

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Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be.”

He has produced a list of gripes and a modest list of wishes for Leopard Mail.

I see what he means when he asks for more flexible searching:

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

It would be great at the click of a Finder-like plus sign to search for emails from a particular sender with a particular word in the subject line:

That’s much easier than the Boolean search “hack” for Mail.

The complaint about smart mailboxes is also right on target. And well-observed; I’d not noticed it before.

When you create a smart mailbox and select “message is in mailbox” you get a list of your existing smart mailboxes. When you try to create a “message is not in mailbox” criterion, you don’t. Why not? He wants it fixed.

His modest feature requests — an iLife media browser and the automatic compression of multiple attachments — are not what I would choose, but it’s great to see someone thinking outside the box and coming up with features that add functionality not just eye-candy.

A fine post.

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Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention , Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).

She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:

When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.

This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.

By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.

[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]

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CTM Development has released a new beta of its email client PowerMail.

The new beta (5.5b2) is now a fully native universal application, a development which the company says underscores its “commitment to PowerMail’s future”.

It is now twice as fast thanks to code rewrites for its new universal status and upgrades to the database format.

The developers also say that Intel Mac users will notice much improved stability.

I took a look at PowerMail, which advertises itself as “A better Mac OS X mail client than Apple’s own”, at the end of last year.

I was unimpressed then with its IMAP support, lack of native spam filtering, its lack of extensibility and its cost (USD 82 = 65 euros including a bundled copy of SpamSieve).

Still, people with POP accounts who like more complicated searching than Mail.app can provide, extensive AppleScript support and a mail client with a built-in text snippet manager might like to try it out.

You can download a demo of the new universal beta from the app’s web site .

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