A poster on macOSXHints notes that Leopard Mail now supports Spotlight sophistication in its searches.

This means that you can use a limited set of operators to construct more complex and better-targeted searches than you ever could before. Spotlight in Leopard can filter results by metadata categories like “author:” or “date:”. Leopard Mail does the same thing.

For example, this search lets me quickly find all the emails sent from a Christ Church South Yarra email address that contain the word “beer”. Not as many as one might think! Still, the search enables me to find quickly that the answer is Boags.

Another search from work yesterday quickly finds all the emails from the Director of Communications at College which contain the word “font”. Without too much browsing I discover that Optima is the approved font for all external communications and can get on with actually writing one.

A third example. This search lists all the emails that have arrived since 3 December that mention Tiger, including the one from a Hawk Wings reader who wonders why I don’t post about Tiger Mail anymore.

Not everything about Leopard Mail is focussed on greater productivity, but this smarter way of digging through your email and finding what you are looking for is a great leap forward.

After a few posts carping on about this or that failing in Mail.app, it’s good to stumble on something like this and remember what a truly great email client it is.

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Pierre Igot takes aim at the behaviour of the Save button in Leopard Mail, with the rigour and vigour which are his trademarks.

In Tiger Mail, he points out, you could click on the button to bring up a “Save As…” dialog that offered a location for saving all the attachments in the message.

In Leopard Mail, however, you need to click-and-hold on the button in order to bring up an enhanced contextual menu with more options for individual attachments.

He calls this a bug rather than an improvement:

The simple and most obvious option, which is a single click on the button, no longer works—which does not make sense, because the button’s visual appearance suggests both a regular button that responds to a single click (like the “Quick Look” button next to it) and a button that brings up a pop-up menu (with the triangle). Besides, the tool tip clearly suggests that the button should respond to a simple click as well.

I’ve had more than one email from users who thought that the button was broken, because it did nothing when they clicked it., so Pierre is not alone.

Head over to Betalogue and read the whole piece.

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The shell script security exploit exposed and then fixed in Tiger Mail has been reintroduced into Leopard Mail.

The loophole allows a sender to disguise an executable file (say, a shell script) as an image or some other harmless file. When clicked on, the executable file runs. Don’t remember? See the Hawk Wings post at the time (Feb, 2006).

Now, it’s back. You can test for yourself. The Heise Security web site offers to send you a test email. Give them an email address and after a confirmation, the email arrives:

CLick on the “jpg” to open it, and it runs a shell script, listing your current directory and exiting harmelessly:

Last time, the news prompted a range of responses, some of them rather hysterical. One writer even claimed that it made Mail.app too dangerous to use.

I am happy to follow John Gruber’s lead (again). As he said last time:

“It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Puzzling that it’s back, yes. But dangerous? No more than usual.

UPDATE: “FatYank” provides a quick fix in the comments for those who are really worried about this:

The workaround for this is to rename Terminal. When you rename Terminal and double click on the JPG, you get a message stating that Preview cannot open the file.

Or, as Rob points out, you could use Quickview to view attachments first, in which these “fake” file show up as empty.

Thanks!

[Via The Register ]

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Like many people, Max Shafiq is looking on the Apple Discussion forums for a way to import Tiger Mail messages into Leopard Mail.

Another post in the same thread notes some of the ways not to do it:

I have the same problem Max. I’ve tried importing mailboxes (from the file menu), and also dragging the old Mail folders to the new Mac’s Library… both attempts only partially successful, with most mail missing completely.

Actually, the answer is fairly simple. Just follow the method in this previous Hawk Wings’ post on importing emlx messages into Tiger Mail. Nothing’s changed.

It involves quitting Mail, making a backup, creating a new Mailbox in your ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder, copying in the individual emlx files (that is, the messages) you want to import, restarting Mail, selecting the new mailbox which will appear in the list of mailboxes “On my Mac” and rebuilding it. Voilà! The messages appear, with timestamps and everything else nicely preserved.

Piece of cake.

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As the arrival of each major new version of Mac OS X draws near, I start to dread the reappearance of those lozenge-shaped icons in my Mail.app interface.

Some people, more adaptable than I am, don’t mind them at all. For me, it always the first tweak I apply, using the excellent Mail Stamps utility.

Fortunately Mail Stamps developer Andrew Escobar is already working on the Leopard Mail version, which will be Mail Stamps 3.0.

In reply to my nervous email, he replies that,

Under the hood, Mail has not changed a great deal. I have been able to get full size toolbar items, so it should not be a problem. I fully plan to release a new version of Mail Stamps for both Leopard and Tiger.

Yippee!

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The next best thing to Mail.app is a copy of Thunderbird skinned to look like Mail. At least, that was clearly the case until GyazMail got IMAP support.

Another Apple Mail skin has appeared for Thunderbird, bringing the total to three.

This one, called “Apple Mail”, offers the Tiger Mail look.

The developer says it “makes your TB look and feel like the native Apple Mail software, that comes along wiht your shiny and flashy new Mac.”

Things start to fall apart a bit in the Compose window though:

The “Tiger Mail” theme offers Thunderbird users the same look.

CrossOver provides a Panther Mail look.

Take a look at both of them in an earlier Hawk Wings post and/or go grab Apple Mail from the Thunderbird Add-ons site.

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