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August 29, 2006

Pimp My Mail.app

One of the new, touted-at-WWDC features of Leopard comes in the form of an upgraded Mail.app. Apple has taken some pains to integrate iCal and Mail, which allows us mere mortals to do handy things, like turn an e-mail message into a calendar to-do reminder - dang useful when you need to remember to, say, reply to someone's mail at a particular point in the future.

In my opinion, these new features really point to the centrality- primacy, really - of e-mail as one's way of managing the world. I, for one, am dead in the water without my e-mail - it's a conversation tracker, life scheduler, serial-number-keeper and bad-joke conduit all rolled into one.

When I moved to Mac OS X back in 2001, I did so whole-hog, and decided to use as many of Apple's bundled products as possible. Part of this was driven by availability (back in the early-transition days of OS X 10.1, there wasn't a whole lotta choice in the 'ol application space, if you know what I mean), and part was driven by a desire to try out some of the highly-regarded NeXT apps that were finally available on the Mac- Mail.app among them. And so, with a slight tear in my eye, I kicked Eudora on Mac OS 9 to the curb and went with Apple's built-in solution. On the whole, it's been a pretty seamless transition.

But.

Mail.app has been slammed by some, and justifiably so, as being a good "80% solution" to people's mail needs. In English, that means it does the basics - but not much else. So if you're checking and sending generic IMAP e-mail, it's great. But once you need robust rules support, or are managing gi-normous e-mail archives, or want integrated calendaring and contact management, well, you were either forced to grit your teeth or switch to competitive products like Entourage. Problem is, Mail.app is nicely integrated with the rest of Mac OS X, which means that switching from Mail also means that you're switching from AddressBook, giving up iChat integration, and likely losing Spotlight support. It's a big cost to bear.

I've been gritting my teeth.

Lately, however, two new products have come on to the market that have a) made my Mail.app experience about 2,000,000% better, and b) given me real hope that a thriving, vibrant market for add-ons and plugins to Mail is just on the horizon.

I'm talking about Mail Act-On and MailTags.

These programs extend Mail.app through some (undocumented) APIs, and, broadly, allow you to pimp your Mail.app today, in a way not too unlike what Apple will offer, built in, with Leopard.

The first of these, Mail Act-On, allows you to associate a keystroke with a mail-processing rule. This lets you create and associate a virtually unlimited number of mail "rules" that can be invoked with a keystroke. For instance, I am forever finding myself spending time mousing around in Mail, filing e-mail from friends in their respective folders. With Mail Act-On, I can create a rule that says, "When you see a mail message from Richard, file it in Richard's personal folder on the hard drive." Then, once I'm done replying to a message Richard has sent me, I just hit the "Act On" key and the message is zapped to its home.

Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to build a pretty comprehensive list of Act-On rules for people I e-mail on a regular basis. So today, when mail comes in, I can zoom through my Inbox in record speed. It's just wonderful. (It's truly astonishing how much time you can spend goofing around in an interface, as opposed to Getting Work Done.)

MailTags, on the other hand, lets me link a mail item to iCal, much as Leopard will. Let's say that message from Richard needs some followup or action from me in a few weeks' time. All I have to do is tag the mail and give it a date; MailTags will file it in iCal as a to-do. Then, when the relevant date rolls around in iCal, I see both the to-do and a link back to the original mail message. This has helped ensure that I'm not missing to-dos, or forgetting some relevant piece of information on the date when I need it.

Which rocks.

There is a growing number of plug-ins for Mail, but Apple really ought to unlock its developer community through better documentation for plug-in authors. I can guarantee that Mail.app, as the incumbent/default mail application on OS X, will be taken much, much farther by the wisdom of the user community than Apple can take it on its own.

In the meantime, feel free to get the jump on "Spring 2007" by pimping out your Mail.app with some slick add-ons.

(Big thanks to the folks over at Mail.app blog HawkWings for all the tips!)

UPDATE, December 31, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at August 29, 2006 9:51 PM. Posted to Apple | Geek.

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