Every now and then you run across something in NetNewsWire that makes you chuckle.

I love Mail.app to death, but I am willing to admit that its IMAP support is less robust than it could be.

So the clever irony of this Freudian slip in a blogger’s headline struck me at once:

Sometimes Mail does frantically spin its wheels without getting anywhere. It needs a thrash folder.

However, the post he references on setting up Mail’s special IMAP folders for Sent, Drafts, Trash and Junk mail is excellent. Not knowing about this is a source of frustration to a lot of people on the Apple Discussion Boards and elsewhere.

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Obviously, few things are more harmful to your productivity than deleting files that you are working on by accident.

TrashMagic offers an additional back-stop. It keeps a cache of your Trash and allows you to recover files that you have deleted by accident or destroyed in a reckless spring-clean only to discover that you really do need them a week later.

The Preferences pane allows you to set the amount of space it may use for its cache, the length of time to keep files and more:

The Data Recovery pane lists the files in the cache and offers you options to flush the cache permanently or recover individual files:

An updated version (1.0.1) was released today which adds password-protection to the Recovery function.

The demo version will only recover files that have been deleted within the last five minutes, but still gives you a good sense of whether this is a life-saver for you or not.

Life-saving comes at a price. TrashMagic costs USD 49, making the most expensive piece of software ever to appear on Hawk Wings (except for FastMailBase).

Test-drive the demo and read more about its features on the developer’s web site .

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macOSXHints returns from holidays with a simple but great tip.

You can delete an email permanently by pressing the keyboard shortcut for “Cut” — Command-X — when the message is highlighted in Apple Mail.

Makes sense when you think about it, but I’d never thought of it before. It also saves a second trip to the Trash to delete the messages again when you are spring cleaning.

Check it out; and read Rob’s cautionary footnote.

UPDATE: As David Chartier wisely points out on TUAW, bypassing the Trash like this mean that when the email is gone, it’s really gone.

However, if you realise you’ve done a stupid thing, the “paste” key (Command-V) will return the message from the clipboard to the mailbox, providing that you haven’t placed something else on the clipboard in the meantime. Whew!

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