At MacWorld, Scott Kelby presents a fistful of Address Book tips from his book Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.

He covers merging duplicate entries for the one contact, map look-ups, a quick link to a Spotlight search on a contact and more.

He also provides a tip for sharing your Address Book. But it requires .Mac accounts, which not everyone has.

If the people who you want to share with are on the same Rendezvous network, there is a better way – check out address-o-sync.

In his “Devil’s Advocate” column at MacObserver, John Kheit reveals just how much information about the files on your computer is stored as metadata in Spotlight’s database and elsewhere.

Did you know, for example, that a metadata record is kept of the location from which you downloaded every file in Safari? This information is not embedded in the file and not sent on when you forward the file, but other kinds of metadata are.

The column details the different types of metadata on your Mac and how to find them, outlines some privacy concerns and provides advice about stripping it before sending files to others.

One solution, he suggests, is to get Mail.app to strip metadata from attachments before sending them.

Potential breaches of privacy and confidentiality are concerns for everyone, not just Windows Vista users.mail.app, apple mail, privacy, metadata, spotlight

Pierre Igot at Betalogue is one of Mail.app‘s most eagle-eyed critics. He finds design flaws and departures from Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines that no one else notices.

In a long and interesting post, he writes about using Apple Mail without the Preview Pane, about several foibles in the way Spotlight is used in Mail.app, about the inconsistent use of hyperlinks in Mail’s interface and about more elegant ways this could have been done.

I never go away from his blog without learning something. Worth a read.

Everyone these days needs some way to organise their information. Solutions range from Juggernauts like DevonThink to the invigorating textual asceticism of Merlin Mann’s plain text filing system.

StickyBrain, my organiser of choice, has just been updated to 4.0. There’s a swagload of new features and a new look for the app’s interface.

The Rise and Rise of the Mail-like look continues among note and information organisers. First, iOrganize got it. Now StickyBrain gets the Mail-like makeover:

Users of 3.x will also notice that the Panther-like folder drawer is gone, replaced by Mail.app‘s Baby Blue integrated Folder Drawer on the left.

The new version features many improvements to existing features, and new things like Spotlight support, new PDF, Movie, Bookmark, Audio, Web Archive and File notes, a 300-1000% speed improvements through the software (very welcome, I must admit) and a much smarter FlashNote menubar utility.

StickyBrain costs money (USD 39.99 — or 25 for the upgrade from 3.x) and is available from the developer’s web site.

Now, this is clever.

Zoë is an app, written in Java, that runs as a proxy in the background, indexing, hyperlinking, archiving, full-text indexing and cataloguing all your mail.

It serves up the results as HTML pages that you access through your browser, either locally or remotely. Of course, you can also continue to use Mail.app as usual.

Numerous reviewers call it an app that “googles your mail”. Dion Almaer puts it more colourfully:

Zoe is a really cool app that uses Lucene to index the hell out of your email. And, all on the client side… without Google Ads bothering you.

This may not sound so attractive now that Apple Mail makes use of Spotlight, but Zoë can do things that Spotlight can’t. Several large screenshots are required here, so you will find more on Zoë after the jump.

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Janet Tokerud has had enough.

She is frustrated by the constant updating of Spotlight search results:

Today I was looking for my copy of Take Control of Apple Mail and saw something close right away. Before I could click on it, it was long gone as more and more updates occurred every couple of seconds. Eventually, there was no sign of the Take Control documents — I have about 6 different ones.

Of course there are even better reasons to buy oneself a copy of the new Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger for Christmas, but I can’t find any blog posts on which to hang them.