Hawk Wings » smart mailboxes

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:

Hiding to-dos in Leopard Mail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:17:41 +0000

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the lack of options for displaying to-dos in Leopard Mail is disappointing. And frustrating.

A poster in the macOSXHints forums has come up with a good work-around for avoiding that long list of finished tasks.

He has created a Smart Mailbox called “Not Done” which is set up to display all to-dos that are incomplete:

Simple, really. Why didn’t I think of that? mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, to-dos, tips, productivity, smart mailboxes, workaroundsSimilar Posts:

10.5.1 is out: Mail and iCal fixes

Tim Gaden — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:50:21 +0000

10.5.1 is out! You can find it in Software Update and on the Apple web site .

It brings – as it needs to – a raft of fixes and patches for everything from Disk Utility to the Finder “data loss bug” to Time Machine. You can read the full list in the Apple tech note that accompanies the update.

What interests us most, perhaps, are the changes to Mail.app and iCal:

It promises more reliable iCal email alarms, that is, they should work now.

UPDATE: And they do! Excellent. Am I becoming hard to please, or is it a little annoying how the alert brings up a new message window and fills it in front of your eyes, interrupting whatever you happen to be doing? I seem to remember in Tiger that these email alerts were created “behind the scenes”.

Let me know how it goes for you. apple, ical, mail.app, apple mail, alarms, update, smart mailboxesSimilar Posts:

Three new online tutorials for Mail.app users

Tim Gaden — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:42:53 +0000

If you ever stop blogging for a bit due to an insane period in your Real Life, you will notice that eventually collections of interesting things begin to pile up in your inbox.

Over the last little while, three helpful on-line tutorials have appeared which offer Mail.app users extra tips on smart mailboxes, spam protection and setting up IMAP accounts.

Merlin Mann at 43Folders has written up some good tips on smart mailboxes , how to make them and how to use them to make yourself more productive. He includes screenshots of some useful smart mailbox setups which are ripe for copying or for sparking off your own thinking about how smart mailboxes could make your life easier.

Macinstruct writer Matthew Cone explains how Mail.app users can better protect themselves from spam by outlining the main methods for catching spam, how Apple Mail’s “latent semantic analysis” spam filter works and how to make the best use of it. Finally, the explains how to set up SpamSieve for those who need extra Bayesian protection.

Dan Rubin has discovered that “a surprisingly large number of people donâ€™t know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Appleâ€™s Mail.app.” He plugs the gap with a “mini-tutorial” on get it right, including Mail.app’s mysterious ” Use this mailbox for…” option which trips a lot of people up.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, smart mailboxes, spam, IMAP, junk mail, emailSimilar Posts:

Mailboxer 5.0: Smart mailboxes for everyone

Tim Gaden — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:07:28 +0000

Sven-S. Porst has updated his Mailboxer utility, which quickly creates smart mailboxes in Mail.app to match all the emails to and from contacts in your Address Book.

It now comes with options to create smart mailboxes for a particular Address Book Group or for all your contacts, French and German localisations and the ability to enter a customised name for the top-level smart mailbox created in the process.

So, now when I fire it up, I get a dialog that lets me select the Group and name of the smart mailbox:

Because I usually need to find all the emails from only a few of my contacts, I selected my “Favourites” Address Book Group.

Now, I have “persistent” searches for my boss, work colleagues, wife and buddies just a click away.

I know mutt users who have a gazillion physical mail folders, one for each contact, and who file emails religiously (and laboriously, I imagine) away into the appropriate folders.

With Mailboxer they can kiss their folders good-bye, dump everything into one big archive and let the smart mailboxes sort them out.

The app’s Preferences provide further options for sorting the contents of the smart mailboxes:

Mailboxer now also joins the tribe of apps with an auto-update feature.

Of course, if you tire of being so organised, you can just delete the top-level smart mailboxes and you’re back to normal.

It is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site . mail.app, apple mail, address book, productivity, tips, smart mailboxes, contactsSimilar Posts:

Mailboxer: Smart mailboxes for contacts

Tim Gaden — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:48:31 +0000

Mailboxer is a smart little utility that quickly creates a smart mailbox in Mail.app for each of the contacts in your Address Book.

Developer Sven Porst feels that this is a real gap in Mail’s feature set. He really wanted a “smart mailbox per contact” option rather than the hassle of manual filing or endless rules. Then,

I discovered that Mail simply stores all the settings for its smart mailboxes in a single properly list file. And thus the simple idea to just write a little program which grabs the necessary contact information from the address book and updates that file with a bunch of smart mailboxes based on the contact information was born. Far from perfect and a bit hackish. But doing the job and â€“ most importantly â€“ reasonably easy to do.

Mailboxer is the result.

By default, it really does create a smart mailbox for every Address Book contact. In a nice little touch, it makes a backup of your existing smart mailbox settings at the same time (SmartMailboxes Pre Mailboxer.plist) and stores it away in your Mail folder in case something goes drastically wrong.

Each smart mailbox lists all emails sent from and sent to every email address listed for the contact:

This is a real time-saver. Still, for me, a smart mailbox for every contact is too many smart mailboxes. I would make good use of about a dozen, but not 465.

Luckily, Mailboxer saw me coming. If it finds a group in Address Book called Mailboxer, it will only create smart mailboxes for the contacts in that group.

It’s easily done. In a jiffy I created a group containing people whose emails I do need to find quickly and often — important work colleagues, my boss, my boss’s boss, my wife and so on:

Then I ran Mailboxer.

Now I have a manageable number of smart mailboxes that I will use at least ten or fifteen times a day. That’s a lot of typing into Mail’s search field that I have saved myself.

And if I find that I don’t use them as much as I thought, I can just delete the AB folder that contains them all.

Mailboxer is donation-ware and is available from Sven’s web site .

UPDATE: Sven has updated the app to fix a small bug with Company names. You can get the updated version here .smart mailboxes, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, address book, contacts, pluginsSimilar Posts:

A modest Leopard Mail wish-list

Tim Gaden — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:52:03 +0000

Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “Iâ€™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.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, leopard mail, smart mailboxes, searching, media browswer, attachmentsSimilar Posts:

Entourage classy but just too slooooow

Tim Gaden — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:33:53 +0000

Khoi Vinh has had enough . Although he is a long-time Entourage user and finds that the app is “a class act” that “frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoftâ€™s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer”, he’s dumped it. It was just too slow and the new Intel Mac version too far away.

He’s liking his new email client, Mail.app, a lot:

There may be a fantastic new iteration of Entourage in the works, but I need a fast, nimble and Intel-friendly email client today. So Iâ€™ve switched over entirely to Appleâ€™s Mail; thereâ€™s just no arguing with its lightning fast search performance, its Mac OS X native fit and finish, and the fact that itâ€™s available right now.

Of course, there are some things that he doesn’t like. The perfect email client is yet to appear. In particular Mail’s Smart Mailboxes don’t seem so smart to him.

But it has proved the right move. Most of all, he’s loving the improvement with IMAP accounts:

Mail is very responsive with IMAP, to the point where itâ€™s a nearly seamless experience, more or less exactly how IMAP was intended to work. This allows me to move easily between work and home computers while keeping my mail database in sync, and without effort. Brilliant.

mail.app, apple mail, entourage, microsoft, imap, junk, switcher, email, smart mailboxesSimilar Posts:

Counting the crappinesses in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Mon, 08 May 2006 12:45:05 +0000

Mindless Fluffiness doesn’t like Mail.app much.

In fact, he thinks it’s so bad that he cannot fathom “why people go on about Apple’s great software”.

He has a list of eight grievances, which I’m going to reproduce in full:

1. They broke the ability to bind a key sequence to applescript in latest version
2. Earlier versions failed to check the certificate name of server in SSL connections
3. Can’t filter to display only unread messages
4. Does not spell check the Subject line when spell checking rest of message
5. Can’t include folder name in filter rule criteria
6. Search does not seem to use Spotlight
7. You can choose to check spelling when you send, or to have red squiggles under misspelled words – however you can’t have both. This is “upgrade” from pervious version where you could not spell check on send at all.
8. If you have two email address for a person, no way to set the preferred one.

No one respects the right of people to have an opinion, to use NotifX, to say Mail sucks or whatever more than I do.

Still, I can’t help mentioning:

1. Quicksilver triggers or FastScripts offer excellent workarounds for this.

3. A Smart Mailbox with the condition “Message is Unread” achieves this nicely.

6. Mail uses its own database for searches involving To, From, and Subject lines. For everything else it uses Spotlight. Scott Morrison , the developer of Mail Act-on and MailTags, has written a nice, simple explanation of searches in Mail.

8. Address Book allows you to set a default email address for people with more than one.

That still leaves four.

But a happy relationship with an email client is like the love of a good woman. It’s the art of compromise.mail.app, apple mail, searching, smart mailboxes, address book, unhappy users Similar Posts:

More informative smart mailboxes?

Tim Gaden — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 12:47:30 +0000

Boris Anthony is one of those people who is always thinking about how Mail.app could be better.

In the past, he has wondered about how to Mail could be better integrated with iCal and how Spotlight searches in Mail could be smarter.

Today he wishes that his smart mailboxes were smarter. At least, that they would tell him the number of emails in each folder, not just the number of unread ones.

And he mocks up an image of what that would look like.smart mailboxes, hacks, message counts, mail.app, apple mail Similar Posts: