The poster at Apathy Online has developed a quick hack for Panther Mail users that will give them the “Outlook-like” three-pane layout.

Tiger Mail users can use Aaron Harnly’s excellent Letterbox plugin . However, despite a few positive reports, Aaron doesn’t promise seamless operation in Panther Mail.

If Letterbox fails you in Panther, this could be the fall-back you are looking for.

The end result looks like this:

Installing it is easier than you might think.

First, quit Mail. Then navigate to it in your Applications folder and right-click on Mail’s icon. Select the “Show Package Contents” option:

Then navigate through the Contents and Resources folders to the English.lproj folder. (Or the lproj folder for the language you use.)

Open it. Find the MessageViewer.nib file:

Back-up the original file before you do anything, either making a duplicate in the same place or copying it to the Desktop.

Then right-click on the MessageViewer.nib icon, choose the “Show Package Contents” option again and replace the files inside with the three modified files from ApathyOnline.

Restart Mail.app and enjoy.

Disclaimer: I have not tested this myself, no longer having a Mac with Panther installed. Also, since I can’t remember that far back, I have simply assumed the layout of the Mail package is the same. If it isn’t, I hope that someone will tell me.

Tags: Apple Mail, hacks, mail.app, outlook, panther, three-pane, Tiger, widescreen

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Gabor Cselle has posted some examples of innovative email client design which break the three-pane “Folder -> Email list -> Selected Message” design straight-jacket, popularised by Outlook (and now also available in Mail.app).

The central problem with email clients, he suggests, is not getting rid of Junk emails; it’s learning how to deal more cleverly and efficiently with what’s left:

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

He presents three creative attempts to solve that problem.

TaskMaster , developed by XEROX at PARC in 2003, puts your tasks at the top of the hierarchy, with emails and attachments related to that task grouped underneath:

Bifrost from Lotus Research organises email on the basis of who sent it, rather like Microsoft’s SNARF project. It relies on you to nominate important contacts and organise contacts by their various relationships to you. After that, email is orgnaised for you in a “social” or relationship-based hierarchy.

Lastly he considers “cool features” like contact maps and thread arcs in ReMail from IBM , both of which structure your emails or contacts in more useful ways than the folder-email-selected email model:

Your mind does stop for a minute when you read something like this.

You suddenly realise how much time you spend making the three-tiered model work for your needs. You get to imagine for a moment what it would be like if the email client worked for you rather than you for it.

Tags: Apple Mail, deisgn, email, Email Client, mail.app, outlook, Productivity, three-pane, UI design, usability

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