At the end of the day, some people just like having things organised neatly into instantly recognisable piles.

For them Doug Hellman has produced an applescript that automates the process of archiving emails by year and month.

As he says on his web site, “Each time it processes a message, it automatically maintains a folder hierarchy based on the parent, year, and month”. Doug also provides instructions on setting it up to work with a Mail Act-on rule.

The script has recently been updated.

In version 1.2 he has updated the scripts,

to make them more reliable as mail rule actions by using the perform_mail_action hook and taking the selection from the info passed in instead of asking Mail for the current selection.

I don’t know what this means, but it impresses the hell out of me. mail.app, apple mail, applescript, archiving, filing, sorting, folders, month, year, tipsSimilar Posts:

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MailRecent provides a quick filing solution for Mail.app.

It adds three new menus — “Copy to Recent”, “Move to Recent”, and “Go to Recent” — to Apple Mail. Each of these contains dynamically-updated lists of recently used mailboxes:

The number of mailboxes listed in the menus is controlled by the “Number of Recent Items” setting for Documents in the Appearance panel of the OS X System Preferences.

By default MailRecent sorts the mailboxes alphabetically, but Greg provides instructions for some Terminal commands to sort them by time or frequency of use.

One small thing. The plugin only lists the name of the mailbox. So, for example, if you have three accounts each with an “Archive” mailbox, you will not be able to tell from the list which one is which.

UPDATE: Greg emails to say that this kind of ambiguity shouldn’t arise. The Usage section on the plugin’s page says that, “If you transfer to one or more mailboxes that happen to have the same name, the menu item titles will be extended with a minimal distinguishing path to the mailbox. This is true whether the “duplicate” mailboxes (same names) are in the same or different mail accounts.” The extension doesn’t appear for me, but it might be there for you. It works for Greg.

Personally, I use Mail Act-on for my filing, but this provides another neat solution to getting mail out of your inbox and where it belongs quickly.

MailRecent is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugin, filing, productivity, mailboxes, sorting, mail act-onSimilar Posts:

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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:

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As he points out:

In Mail.app (the standard mail client on OS X), if the person sending an email to you hasn’t specified a ‘from name’ in their email client (or webmail), the email will show up as being from their raw email address even if their name and email address is in your Address Book. Additionally, if the person has specified a ‘from name’ different from their real name (i.e. a nickname or screen name) then that will show up in the from column.

So you get odd things like this:

Obviously this is visually annoying and sometimes less than informative.

It also throws a spanner in the works when sorting emails by name.

John suggests that the solution is easy:

The Mail User Interface needs the ability to choose either to use Address Book names when there is no supplied ‘from name’ or to always use Address Book names regardless of supplied from name, matching instead on the email address.

It makes you wonder why is hasn’t been fixed.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, From addresses, sorting, annoyancesSimilar Posts:

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It went quite well, but didn’t completely satisfy:

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

He plans to set up an IMAP server to store this kind of information as emails. And he is looking for good sources of material.mail.app, apple mail, pushkin, literature, archiving, searching, sorting

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