Aaron emailed me a screenshot of Mail.app taken from an episode of the TV show Weeds (Series 2, Episode 5), which you can see below. Another screenshot has been posted on Flickr. It seems to show a message preview pane in a drawer on the right.

I am suspicious. It looks like a photoshop job to me.

Tiger icons and Panther Mail drawers seem odd. The Apple menu seems to be missing, the app is identified in the menubar as “Email” rather than “Mail”, the Applescript menu is where it was positioned in Panther, whereas it is on the right in Tiger Mail. The Junk mailbox appears below Trash in Tiger Mail but these are reversed in the screenshot (and these cannot be reordered):

On the other hand, it appears to be a functioning app. I’ve not seen the episode, but Aaron tells me that “the cap comes from a longer sequence that shows the character browsing through an inbox full of mail, with multiple messages popping up in that pane.”

A puzzle. What do you think?

[Thanks to an Apple Mail demi-god for technical advice. You know who you are!]

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Toyo Snow has updated his Tiger Mail theme for Thunderbird, which aims to give it the look of OS 10.4’s Mail.app.

The new version (2.1) uses system fonts for cross-platform compatibility and will now highlight a selected header.

In keeping keeping with its attempts to reproduce the Mail 2.0 look, it now follows Mail.app’s default behaviour of bolding new messages.

A number of other small display glitches have been fixed.

The end result is not an exact match:

You can get the latest version from the Mozilla Thunderbird Add-ons site .

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After reading the piece on Mac Observer’s review of MailTags, a former Greek student of mine emails to ask how the heck she can get this feature in Mail.app.

It’s a new feature in Mail 2.0 or “Tiger Mail” and not enabled by default (I think. Who can remember that far back?), so perhaps she is not the only one.

Open a new message window, as if you were going to compose an email. Down in the bottom lefthand corner of the top pane, you will see a little button with three text fields and a triangle on it:

Click it and select “Customize…”.

You will see a window like this offering all sorts of additional features:

Any option here that you check will be displayed every time you open a Compose window.

Message priority is on the bottom right. You can choose to have the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) button or the field that specifies a different reply-to address always displayed. You can turn off the signature field if you want.

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One feature that many people miss in Apple Mail is the ability to request and answer return receipts.

People with Panther Mail can use MailPriority. For Tiger Mail users, there is an all-or-nothing solution that involves a Terminal hacking. It adds a return receipt request to all your emails.

The only other option for requesting receipts is a third-party service like ReadNotify. (Not a bad idea if you only need them now and then).

But now there is a way to answer the return receipts that others send to you. Joel Nelson has posted an AppleScript which automatically replies to return receipts sent to you by people who use mail clients that support it (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc). The message it generates looks like this:

Download the script and save it somewhere memorable. You will need to browse to it when setting up the rule that runs the script. Follow the instructions on Joel’s site.

You will very probably need to add a “Disposition-Notification-To” header to the list of conditions in Mail.app’s rule menu. Select the Edit header option:

Then click the plus sign on the next window and type “Disposition-Notification-To” so that it looks like this:

Now Apple Mail will automatically reply through the rule to any emails that request a read receipt.

Personally, I don’t miss them. There’s nothing more annoying than people asking you if you have received their message while you are reading it. But I don’t live in a corporate environment. In business some people have an expectation that you will acknowledge their emails in this way, and now with this script you can.

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Another “Mail.app-like” theme for Thunderbird has been released.

Called TigerMail, it aims to reproduce “the sleek OS X Tiger Mail“.

You can judge for yourself how well it succeeds:

The other Apple Mail make-over for Thunderbird, CrossOver, goes for the Panther Mail look.

The Thunderbird community rate TigerMail at 4.04 and CrossOver at 3.94 out of a possible five stars.

TigerMail is available from the Mozilla add-ons site.

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1. “Tweaking Tiger Mail“ by Giles Turnbull.
2. The Apple Mail chapter of Mac OS X Tiger Unleashed (2005) by William and John Ray.
3. “The Fight Against Spam, Part 2″ by François Joseph de Kermadec
4. Wikipedia’s entry on Mail.app.
5. “Using encryption and digital signatures in Mail” by Joar Wingfors.

Hmmm… Lists of five are harder than they look. For example, it means that I can’t mention the very good “Mail.app enhancements” by Justin Williams at MacZealots.

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