The owner of rtfa.net has posted a list of the things that are annoying, broken or just plain scandalous about Mail.app.

He is an unhappy Apple Mail user: “Well, if Thunderbird integrated with spotlight and OSX address book, it’d be a no-brainer. However, I’m entrenched.”

And life in the trenches with Mail.app is not good.

Three problems score the highest scandal rating — incorrect treatment of IMAP’s “seen flag”, the “lost message” problem and the “invalid pointer” problem.

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Hugo Haas has been wrestling with Mail.app.

Frustrating for him but interesting for us, he’s found four things that Mail.app can’t do:

• IMAP over SSL does not work if used through an SSH tunnel
• SMTP over SSL does not work if a SOCKS proxy is in use
• When a SOCKS proxy is set, excluding a hostname or domain does not work: it just makes any connection to a matching host fail
• Using an PAC file does not give satisfactory results (I don’t remember the details of this one, but basically I bumped into a number of issues)

I’m not so sure about the last one. Mail seems to negotiate the proxy.pac file at my work without any problems. I’ve never tried to do the other three myself.

Still, it’s nice to know that there is still room for improvement in Mail.app and the hope of even better things to come.

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Mail widget is a widget for Mail.

It polls a specified POP, IMAP or .Mac account every time the Dashboard is loaded (even when Mail is not running) and displays the number of unread messages. It also features the option to “speak” the number of new emails.

Version 1.4 is completely rebuilt. It now offers support for SSL connections. The developer claims that it also now much faster. And he is right.

Mail Widget is freeware. You can get it from the developer’s site .

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Postfix Enabler is a graphic front-end to built-in services in Mac OS X that helps you to set up your computer to be its own mail server, that is to run its own SMTP, POP3 and IMAP services, with or without SSL support.

It also provides SSL test certs so that you can test the SSL connection. Going the other way, it offers an option to turn on SMTP-AUTH on the server, so that you can authorise remote users who need to send mail through it.

Plus, mobile users can use it to set up a roving SMTP server so that they can send mail wherever they are, whenever they want, so long as they have an Internet connection.

Version 1.2 has just been released which packages the app as a universal binary.

PostFix Enabler costs USD 9.99 and is available from the developer’s website .

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iSynCal is an app that syncs iCal events, to dos and alarms between two or more Macs without the need for a .Mac account.

It uses the Apple File Sharing feature built into OS X to get its work done and also supports WebDav over SSL, so that iSynCal can automount network volumes.

iSynCal features numerous options, including the ability to automate the synchronisations, as a screenshot of the app’s main window shows:

Click image for a full-sized view

Because iSynCal reads and synchronizes calendar files based on the open iCalendar standard, the new version (5.5) offers full syncing integration between iCal calendars and those generated by Mozilla Sunbird or the Calendar extension for Firefox and Thunderbird.

iSynCal is shareware (USD 25) and a demo is available from the developer’s web site .

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Entourage finally gets Spotlight support in an update for Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 released today.

The update features improvements to all the Office apps, but Entourage gets some features that users have long been asking for. (Remember the Entourage developer who posted here in January looking for user feedback and feature suggestions?)

According to the release notes:

• Entourage now syncs with Mac OS X Sync Services. Users of Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later versions of Mac OS can synchronize Entourage items with other programs, such as Address Book and iCal. You can also synchronize items with other Macintosh computers via Apple’s .Mac online services, and with portable devices, such as phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
• Users of Mac OS X 10.4 or later versions of Mac OS can use Spotlight to search Entourage items. You can use Spotlight to index all unencrypted Entourage items and search their contents.
• Entourage can use smart cards to sign, encrypt, and decrypt e-mail messages. For users of Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later versions of Mac OS, this update provides improved compatibility with Mac OS keychain support for smart cards, such as Common Access Cards. As a result, Entourage can use certificates and private keys stored on smart cards to sign, encrypt, and decrypt Entourage e-mail messages.
• SSL connections to Mac OS X 10.4 servers work correctly Entourage and other Office programs are more compatible with self-signed certificates, which are used to establish secure (SSL) connections to servers running Mac OS X 10.4 Server.
• Entourage is smarter about handling iCal invitations

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