A Japanese graphic artist has created 40 mail stamp icons, featuring various cute animals.

He provides icons for two different coloured icons of an apple, a cat, a chicken, a cow, an elephant, a golden retriever, a hawk, a horse, a monkey hearing no evil, another speaking no evil and one seeing no evil, a husky, a ladybird, a poodle, a rabbit, the weirdest looking sheep I have ever seen, a snail, a snake and a tiger.

The collection also contains two icons of a “black guy”. Here’s a taste of the overall style:

Changing Mail.app’s Dock icon is easy, and fun.

You can get the icons from his web site .

I’ve added them to the Hawk Wings Alternative Mail Stamps Icon list, which which now contains 507 mail stamp icons (assuming all the links still work).

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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:

Image from ApathyOnline

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.

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Not everyone likes the new lozenge buttons in Tiger Mail. John Siracusa at Ars Technica calls them “hideously ugly”. Giles Turnbull at MacDevCenter finds that “Euw…” sums it all up. And Leopard doesn’t remove them.

In fact, the lozenges are spreading. It looks like Preview will feature them in Leopard:

Foad Afshari has posted a disk image containing the “de-lozenged” icons from Tristan O’Tierney’s Cage Fighter , a utility (broken since 10.4.6) that removes the bubble from the buttons. A before and after shot gives you an idea of the transformation:

The disk image also contains the buttons from Panther Mail and instructions on how to manually install them into Mail.app’s package.

However, there is an easier way. Andrew Escobar’s Mail Stamps still works nicely. It does all the hack work for you, replacing the Tiger lozenges with bold and brassy Panther icons:

Mail Stamps includes an uninstaller so you can return to the Tiger look if the mood takes you.

The change will not bust or damage Mail in any way. It only replaces some images deep inside Mail’s application package. You can banish those lozenges with 100% confidence.

Hopefully, someone is already working on “Preview Stamps”.

Related posts

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Several people in the Apple Discussion forums have reported that they are unable to connect to their mail servers after applying the 10.4.7 update.

The problem is (usually) that Mail.app’s new ability to connect through a SOCKS proxy had been turned on during the update.

The fix is simple.

Open up your the Network pane of your System Preferences. Choose your current method of connecting to the Internet (Built-in Ethernet, Airport, etc) and select the Proxies tab on the configuration dialog.

Make sure that the SOCKS proxy box is unchecked:

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Zak Bedell has posted a patch for Mail.app that fixes the broken “applescriptability” of signatures in Mail 2.0.

Prior to OS 10.4, it was possible to set signatures by applescript, allowing for dynamically-set sigs containing system information, random quotes and so forth.

This patch restores that ability. In theory, it should allow you to run applescripted apps like Bushisms (random pearls of wisdom from George W. Bush) and possibly even MailTunes (currently playing iTunes track as signature).

I haven’t tried this out, but would be glad to hear reports from anyone who has.

UPDATE: The developer of MailTunes, Tomas Franzén, emails to confirm that MailTunes does work in Mail 2.0 after this patch is applied. Good news!

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MailPictures is an old favourite.

I think it is the first addon for Mail.app that I ever installed.

It’s a plugin that adds a personalising touch to your emails by adding an “X-Image-Url:” header to your messages (like Mail.app used to have in its early NeXTMail days).

This header links to your .Mac picture or to an image stored in your own web space somewhere. You can also choose to use an X-Face string instead, generated by dairiki.org’s Online X-Face Converter.

Then the recipient of an email from you gets a picture of you in your email, even if they don’t have your image in their Address Book. A personal touch.

MailPictures also allows you compose emails in raw HTML.

Dominik Westner has released a new version (4.0b) that works with Tiger.

WARNING: MailPictures plays havoc with MailTags. The two just don’t get along. And the problem persists (for me at least) with the new version of MailPictures. A great shame.

You can get this plugin (and earlier versions for Jaguar and Panther) from his web site. It’s freeware. Check it out!

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