You don’t have to wait until next year to get your hands on the new features in Mail 3.0. The third-party apps and plugins that may have inspired the new features are available now.

However odd and unsettling this year’s WWDC keynote was (Leander Kahney has some interesting thoughts ), it was good news for Mail.app fans.

Apple has spent some time and energy working on Mail. With the exception of templates, the other new features previewed by Steve Jobs will make it a better productivity tool.

With notes, to-dos and the ability to manage RSS feeds (See Apple’s new Leopard Mail web page for more), Mail 3.0 really will “help you to do more with your Mail” as Apple suggests.

Oddly, Apple’s press release rather oversold these advances. “Leopard’s Mail includes breakthrough new features that have never been seen before in a Mail application,” it pronounces.

Not true. And not smart either. Why the Apple PR machine didn’t adopt a more honest approach (“Leopard’s Mail takes some great ideas and makes them even better”), I don’t know. It’s as if Thunderbird, MailTags, Event Maker, Note to Self, or the stationery in Outlook Express and other mail clients never existed.

In any case, the good news is that you can take advantage of these new features now (if not always in quite the polished form Leopard promises).

To-dos (not system-wide) — MailTags
Templates (not HTML) — Mail Templates, Roll your own
Notes (not RTF) — Note to Self
RSS feeds (in your Inbox) — FeedMailer, rmail

I can’t make up my mind about the new HTML templates. My inner plain-texter revolts, but I can see how some people will find them tremendous fun.mail.app, productivity, apple mail, leopard, todos, iCal, notes, templates, RSS feeds, apple

Extensions now exist which offer Thunderbird users some of the rich extra functions provided by Mail.app plugins. Paolo Koasmos has written a collection of excellent extensions and Paul Tomlin’s Quick File gets close to the filing magic offered by Mail Act-on.

Paulo’s AttachmentRemember will catch messages to which you have forgotten to add attachments just like James Eagan’s missing attachments plugin.

Quick file by Paul Tomlin gives filing a tremendous speed boost over the “old drag ‘n’ drop”.

Select a message, hit a user-customizable hotkey (⌃Q works for me), and a dialog appears. Start to type and it offers a list of matching mailboxes that you can navigate through using the arrow keys. It’s quick.

Lastly, Paulo’s ExternalTemplateLoader brings MailTemplate to Thunderbird. It loads an external HTML file as the template for a message or a reply.thunderbird, extensions, filing, templates, attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

MacTank has released a beta version of its MailTemplate plugin, which provides pre-written new message or reply templates for frequent emails.

The new version (1.5.0b1) is a universal binary. It also adds support for Shortcuts by Abracode , a utility that assigns hotkeys to Contextual Menu items.

The interface has been improved; it gains a real toolbar interface and the editor has an updated look:

A new Contextual Menu item offers the option to use a template when emailing a file from a Finder window.

MailTemplate is shareware (USD 14.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .mailtemplate, templates, replies, apple mail, mail.app, plugins, productivity

Templates of frequently used messages can be a great time saver.

Although you can create them in Mail.app with MailTemplate or even TextExpander, there is a way to achieve the same thing without using any add-ons or extras.

1. Create a new message and edit it to your heart’s content.
2. Save it as a Draft (Command-S or File > Save as Draft)
3. Drag the message from the “Drafts” folder to whatever folder/mailbox you like, possibly a new mailbox you have created and called “Templates”
4. In order to create a new message based on a selected template, select the message in the “Templates” folder and select “Message > Send Again” from the Message menu (or hit Command-Shift-D to achieve the same thing).

[With thanks to Andreas Amann (developer of Mail Scripts and Eudora Mailbox Cleaner ) who taught me this on the Apple Discussion Boards today.]mail.app, apple mail, tips, templates, productivity

While compiling the Hawk Wings Plug-ins and Add-ons List, I came across three two one well-known plug-ins that don’t work in Tiger (or aren’t needed so much), won’t be updated and look likely to fade away. So, a quick eulogy to old friends.

MailEnhancer is very much alive. MailEnhancer gave us signature matching for specific accounts, made the dock icon count all unread messages, not just those in the inbox, and launched the Activity Viewer on a manual mail check. It was the first ever plug-in I installed. (Sebster writes in the comments to this entry that reports of MailEnhancer’s death (by me) are greatly exaggerated. It works fine, although the developer’s website is down. Excellent! Get it from versiontracker.)

MailTemplate is back. MailTemplates offered users the ability to use pre-made messages or templates to send similar messages to different people. In its most recent version it also included some extras for the contextual menu which were very useful. It doesn’t work correctly in Mail 2.0 and the developer has announced that its development is discontinued. That’s sad, but leaves a hole in the market for an enterprising coder.

Mail Priority allowed you to set the priority level of messages, to request “mail received” receipts from the people you emailed and colouring of messages via the contextual menu. It doesn’t work with Tiger and the developer hasn’t said that he has any plans to update it.

There must be more. Old friends, gone but not (quite) forgotten.graveyard, plugin, mail.app, MailEnhancer, MailPriority, MailTemplates, message priority, return receipts, notification, templates