The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.mail.app, apple mail, rules, productivity, mail act-on, tutorial, tips, sorting, folders, imap

James Eagan, the creator of the Missing Attachments plugin, has written a tutorial on how to make a Mail.app plugin.

He writes:

In the course of writing my email un-attachment plugin for Mail.app, I found that Apple has a capable, but entirely undocumented, plugin API. I’m providing this tutorial in the hopes that it may be useful to anyone else considering implementing a plugin for Apple Mail.

Personally, I can’t understand a word of it, but many Hawk Wings readers with Python skills will no doubt find it excellent.

A poster on the macOSXHints forums has already used the tutorial to create a plugin that does something with signatures in Mail.app (adds a random signature to each email from the UNIX program Fortune?).plugins, tutorial, howto, signatures, python, mail.app, apple mail, fortune

One of the “Mac heads” at Skype has produced a tutorial on how to insert a Skype graphic into an HTML signature for Apple Mail.

This walk-through is more detailed than the tip posted on macOSXHints and is useful even if you want to insert a different graphic into your signature.

UPDATE: You now need a Skype account to view this tip on the Skype site. And one with more privileges than I have.skype, signatures, email, graphic, walk-through, tutorial, howto, mail.app, apple mail, tips, HTML