From a thread on the Apple Mail Discussions Board come some tips for going backwards in Mail.app from the new emlx file format in Mail 2.0 to Panther Mail’s mbox format:

1. The emlx to mbox converter that’s been blogged here before, but with a step-by-step walkthrough.
2. Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts contains an Archive script that can export Tiger’s emlx files as an mbox file.

One poster is going backwards because Tiger Mail has too many problems. Another is going backwards for various reasons he won’t go into. A third user on MacUsers.org is going backwards because his work set-up demands it.

Related posts

• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail
• Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail
• Mark Pilgrim and Mail.app’s “Save As…” function
• Mail 2.0’s three different file types
• John Gruber, Mark Pilgrim, Mail.app and openness

MailTunes is a free-standing app that provides you with a dynamically changing signature for your emails. By default it contains info about the track currently playing in iTunes, but it can be configured to report uptime or anything else you know how to ring out of its shell script.

This sounds like a great idea, but I can’t get it to work. It reports all sorts of alarming messages in the Console like this,

and this,

Then Mail hangs. As an added bonus it has erased all my existing signatures.

Perhaps it’s my fault. It often is. Perhaps it’s not compatible with Tiger (although there’s no warning about that on the developer’s website).

UPDATE: Mystery solved. The developer Tomas replied to my email with lightning speed (Thanks). He writes,

MailTunes does not work in Tiger yet, unfortunately. This is a bug in Apple Mail that prevents scripts from setting the contents of signatures. I have reported it, and the best I can do at this time is to hope this bug is one of the ones fixed in the upcoming OS X 10.4.3. When it’s fixed, the current version of MailTunes should begin working again. I do have a newer version in the works, but I didn’t see any point in releasing it until this problem is resolved.

So, a plug-in to look forward to. Or to enjoy if you are still on Panther or Jaguar.

Related posts

• SignatureProfiler 1.3: Skype, HTML, CSS, images, hyperlinks and more
• Signature Profiler: Clever signature plugin for Mail.app
• SignatureProfiler for Leopard Mail
• Roll your own Mail.app plugin
• Fix for AppleScript in Mail.app’s signatures