Quicksilver, LaunchBar and Butler users will benefit from a tip on macOSXHints which provides search strings that they can use to quickly launch searches of their Gmail messages.

The tip includes the string for LaunchBar but the comments from Rob Griffiths and others provide the same information for Quicksilver and Butler users.

Lantrix’s comment lower down also offers a quick tutorial on how to set the string up as a web search in Quicksilver. Quick. Nifty.gmail, quicksilver, butler, launchbar, tip, searching

macOSXHints posts a useful iCal tip that was news to me.

If you hold down the Option key while scrolling your mouse wheel up and down, it “zooms” your iCal screen in and out, adjusting the number of visible hours in the current view on the fly.

No more time-consuming trips to iCal’s Preferences for me. No more getting ambushed by some evening commitment I can’t see and have forgotten about.ical, tip, visible hours, productivity

An anonymous poster on macOSXHints offers a convoluted tip on how to make your .Mac IMAP account more POP-like.

I can’t conceive why one would want to do this, except perhaps to create a more secure environment for MailTags metadata.

But if you do want POP access for your .Mac account, then just follow the Apple technote which describes how to change .Mac Mail from IMAP to POP..mac, dotmac, IMAP, POP, account settings, tip, mail.app, apple mail

On the Apple Discussion Forums, Sturmdrang provides an oddly effective and very seasonal Thanksgiving troubleshooting tip:

“Wait one day and try it again.”

Have a good and thankful day!

A tip on macOSXHints describes how to reclaim some hard disk space by deleting email attachments in Mail.app.

If you are doing a thorough spring clean and want to reclaim as much space as possible, there are two additional things you can do:

1. If you were using Mail when you upgraded to Tiger, there may be useless files in your Mail folder that you can can safely remove.

   I cut down the size of my Mail folder by 25% doing this. The Apple technote referred to in this tip explains how to do that.

2. In Tiger Apple Mail saves a copy of some attachments in a folder called Mail Downloads in the Library folder of your Home directory. (~/Library/Mail Downloads).

   Depending on your settings (see the fifth and sixth drop-down options in Mail > Preferences > General), Mail.app may store things in there forever.

   You can reclaim a lot of space by deleting unneeded attachments in this folder as well as in the messages themselves.

There is no easy way to import messages in the new 10.4 format (individual XML documents with the emlx extension) into Mail.app. It is not one of the options in Mail 2.0′s “Import” menu.

But you can put deleted messages back (if you have them in a backup) or add news ones and force Mail to reindex them. Here’s how:

1. Quit Mail.
2. Make a backup of your complete ~/Library/Mail folder just in case, by Option-Dragging it out of the Finder window onto the Desktop.
3. Create a new directory in your ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder called – for example – “backup.mbox”.
4. Create a sub-folder in the new folder called “Messages”.
5. Copy all the messages (emlx files) that you want to restore from your backup into that sub-folder.
6. Launch Apple Mail. The mailbox you created will be in the list of mailboxes on the left. Highlight it (it will appear empty but isn’t really) and choose “Rebuild” from Mail’s Mailbox menu.
7. Mail.app will rebuild and re-index the messages.
8. When the process is complete you will see the messages you added in the new mailbox. You can then move them to wherever they really belong.

This has worked for me. And I double-checked it again this morning.mail.app, apple mail, emlx, import, messages, tip, mailboxes

Speaking of the Rise and Rise of the Mail-like Look, the GUI hack UNO can bring the unified Toolbar/Titlebar and lighter metal look to all the windows in your system. UNO’s aim is “to enhance aqua interface consistency, by making all elements look and feel as one.”

Here it is with (from the back), Mellel, a word processor, Apple Mail (Mail 2.0 with the odd new buttons removed), ecto and Script Editor:

UNO can be installed and uninstalled by running it from the disk image. You can see more screenshots and download the hack from UNO’s website.UNO, unified toolbar, lighter metal, apple interface, GUI, brushed metal, hack, tip