Mac OS X’s built-in Services can help you work smarter and faster in Mail.app (and elsewhere).

Third party Services plug-ins offer even more options.

Peter Maurer, creator of Textpander, Witch and other productivity gems, has released a utility that helps you manage your Services menu.

My Services menu is clogged with services from old deleted apps and functions that I will never use. With Service Scrubber I can restructure the menu, change the keyboard shortcuts for each service and even disable unwanted ones.

Service Scrubber is donation-ware and available from Peter’s web site.

UPDATE: As Marc Bizer points out in the comments, you can also use Service Manager, a third-party System Preference plug-in from Blacktree, to manage your services menu, although it has slightly fewer features.

UPDATE: (23 December 2005) Peter has released an updated version of the app (1.1) that finds system-owned services more easily and has some additional features.

Speaking of using OS X’s Services menu in Apple Mail to work smarter, two new things deserve a mention.

HotService has been updated. This bundle moves the Services out of the File menu onto the Statusbar for easier access. The new version replaces the “Services” text with a bullet to conserve Statusbar real estate and initialises the Service Menu more quickly on start-up.

InstantLinks is another Services bundle that offers quick and easy shortcuts to various useful “look-ups” on selected text:

Select an address that someone has emailed you, and Google Maps via InstantLinks gives you a handy map. Or highlight a word in a Mail.app message and InstantLinks can take you straight to its Wikipedia entry.

Command-= takes you to the dictionary definition or thesaurus on Answers.com. And so on.

Of course, while these tools help you work better in Apple Mail, by their very nature they are there to help you in any other Cocoa-based app you use.

Both bundles are freeware.

I’ve blogged before about how I use OS X’s Services to make life easier in Apple Mail, especially about Devon’s Word Services.

Textsoap takes text manipulation to an even higher level.

It provides a graphical interface (as well as Services) for over 70 different ways of treating text, whether in Mail.app, a word processor or a text editor.

It comes with plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit, Eudora and MailSmith and works natively with Cocoa-based apps like Apple Mail and Pages.

With AppleScript you can extend its reach to cover Entourage, Word and AppleWorks.

“Scrub” is a pre-set series of text cleaning actions that removes forwarding characters, rewraps paragraphs and more at the press of a single button. You can customise it further with the “my scrub” feature.

But the interface also offers easy access to other functions, like setting the quote level of text quickly, adding initial capitals, changing between upper and lower case and much much more.

You can use it with the built-in editor or with its plug-ins and services inside any app you choose.

Recently the ability to clean Rich Text has been added to its plain text capabilities.

TextSoap costs money (Devon’s Word Services doesn’t), but USD 24.99 is not much to pay for the time it saves if you work with decent quantities of text. A 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site.services, rich text, text formatting, cleaning

Services, or System Services, is a technology built into OS X that allows you to access the features of one application from within another one. Apple describes this little-used feature as

“an open-ended way to extend each other’s functionality by allowing applications to (i) provide services to other applications, and (ii) access functionality provided by other applications”

The developer section of Apple’s web site has a whole section on Services and how they work, but this entry is more practical. Here you will only find (after the jump) three ways that Services can help you work faster and smarter with Apple Mail.

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