A new widget has been released for the very security conscious or for those troubled by spam.

Email Cloaker encodes your email address making it harder for spammers to harvest it for their mailing lists.

It offers two different types of encoding, javascript (right) or HTML character entities (left):

A widget for this seems slightly like overkill to me.

Unless you change your email address often, it might be easier to use a web-based service like Email Address Encoder once, store the result in a text file and just re-use it as needed.

The widget is freeware and is available in Apple’s widget library .email, email addresses, encoding, cloaking, widget, spam

Although Gmail now offers over 2.5 GB of storage, it’s possible to fill that space up with PDFs, images, video and other attachments.

Digital Inspiration offers a list of tips to help you slim down your Gmail Inbox.

The post points out that Gmail doesn’t allow you to search for messages by size. However, Mail.app does, so downloading your Gmail into Apple Mail is not only protection against unexpected disasters at Gmail’s end, but allows you to find the disk space hogs.

If you do use Mail.app to read and manage your Gmail, you may not often visit the web interface and see the message about the amount of space you are using. A full account could creep up on you without warning.

The Gmail Counter Dashboard widget meets that needs. It keeps track of the amount of space you are using.

It’s freeware and available from Dashboard Widgets .gmail, Google, mail.app, apple mail, disk space, widget

While doing some research for something else, I came across two ways to speed up shoe-horning information into your Backpack pages.

Backpack is an online PIM (Personal Information Manager) from the 37signals stable. (“A cool organizational tool. How very cool”, David Pogue says).

Of course, you can email stuff to your pages using the unique email address that belongs to each page. But sometimes even that is not the most efficient way.

The Backpack widget offers you a quick way to view your reminders, lists and pages. You can also add new items or edit existing ones from the Dashboard:

The widget is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

Quicksilver also offers a slick short-cut through its Backpack plugin.

Among other things the plugin allows you to quickly add to-dos, lists and files to your pages whatever app you happen to be in at the time:

Alan Joyce has a public Backpack page containing full instructions on how to set this up in Quicksilver.

Backpack is a good thing. These little add-ons make it even better.

And now that the Basecamp API has been made public, I expect that similar helpers will soon be available for that too.backpack, basecamp, widget, quicksilver, productivity, web 2.0

Mail widget is a widget for Mail.

It polls a specified POP, IMAP or .Mac account every time the Dashboard is loaded (even when Mail is not running) and displays the number of unread messages. It also features the option to “speak” the number of new emails.

Version 1.4 is completely rebuilt. It now offers support for SSL connections. The developer claims that it also now much faster. And he is right.

Mail Widget is freeware. You can get it from the developer’s site .mail.app, apple mail, widget, notification, ssl, IMAP, pop, plugins

Mail Widget is a Dashboard widget that checks one user-specified POP, IMAP or .Mac account every time the Dashboard is loaded, even when Mail is not running.

A new version released this week runs on PowerPC and Intel Macs. It is also a smaller file, due to more efficient compression of its audio contents for voice notifications.

MailWidget is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .widget, dashboard, mail.app, apple mail, notification

Various plugins bring map options to Address Book, but widgets are not so lucky.

Two tips on macOSXHints, one for the People (or White Pages) widget and one for the Business (or “Yellow Pages”) one, show you how to modify the javascript contained in their packages so that you can use Google Maps with them. Quite Handy.map, widget, javascript, white pages, yellow pages

This week Address Book and iCal get the lion’s share of the additions to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

The following items were added to the Address Book section:

• AddressBookQuickEntry (an alternate entry interface for contact information)
• AusAB (maps, travel directions and Sydney public transport times for Australian addresses)
• iAddressX (Address Book menubar utility)

The following were added to the iCal section:

• DoBeDo (a Dashboard widget for iCal ToDos)
• iCalViewer (“Streaming” desktop iCal events and ToDos)
• MenuCalendarClock (menubar utility for you iCal calendar, clock and ToDo and event information)

Mail.app itself scored two extra entries:

• anentry (AppleScript to email a NetNewsWire headline) in the Integration with other Apps section
• NetShred X (history and cache shredder for Mail.app and browsers) in the Added Functionality section

These additions bring the number of entries on the list to a round 120, all making Mail.app, Address Book and iCal easier, more efficient, more productive and (possibly) more fun to use.