Mail.app Enhancements
Juice Up Your Email Client
18 June 2004 Justin Williams Skip to comments
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Mail includes support for plugins which makes it insanely easy to extend its functionality in ways never thought possible. In this article, Justin Williams outlines some of the plugins you can install to make your mail reader even better.
With each version of MacOS X released, Apple has bundled an excellent application to allow Mac users to check their e-mail in an easy and efficient manner. Mail.app is one of the oldest applications on your Mac. With its roots in NextStep, Mail.app has grown from a very basic functions to include filters, junk mail filtering and message views based off a Web browser core.
Even with all of the improvements Mail has seen over the years, there are still some areas that need enhancing. Many power users and switchers from Windows are looking for certain features that was included in Outlook or Eudora, but not on their new application. Apple has made it relatively simple for developers to write plug-ins to extend the functionality of Apple's Mail.app. Add that on to the ability to write your own Applescripts to accomplish some tasks, and you have a pretty impressive repertoire.
This article is going to give an overview of ten plug-ins or scripts that will make using Mail.app. If you feel that I missed out on a certain plug-in or feature enhancement, don't hesitate to leave a comment!
Spam Filters
While Mail.app comes with junk mail filtering capabilities, many find it to be lacking compared to other Mail applications. Two developers have taken it upon themselves to write their own programs to combat the spam that invades your Inbox daily.
SpamSieve from Michael Tsai adds enhanced filtering to not only Mail.app, but several other e-mail applications for the Mac including Eudora, Entourage, Powermail and Mailsmith. From the developer's Web site:
SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to popular e-mail clients. It learns what your spam looks like, so it can block nearly all of it. It looks at your address book and learns what your good messages look like, so it won’t confuse them with spam. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as you train it with more messages. SpamSieve doesn’t delete any messages—it only marks them in your e-mail client—so you’ll never lose any mail. SpamSieve works with any number of mail accounts, of whatever types are supported by your e-mail software (e.g. POP, IMAP, Hotmail, AOL).
SpamSieve learns about what type of mail is actually spam by AppleScripts. It installs in the application's Scripts menu. Whenever you encounter a spam e-mail, simply mark it as such. SpamSieve will become even better at detecting what is good mail and what is not.
In the two weeks that I used SpamSieve, I had 98% accuracy. That is much more than I could say for Mail's default filters.
SpamSieve costs $25 and can be purchased from the developer's Web site.
The other Spam filtering solution available is JunkMatcher. JunkMatcher is an open source project that aims to filter spam using regular expressions. For more information on regular expressions, read the Hyperdictionary definition. It does a far better job than I could explaining it. JunkMatcher also accesses several spam blacklists all around the Web.
Installation of JunkMatcher has improved immensely since its initial releases. Before, installation involved manually setting Mail rules to interact with the application. Now, a simple installer is all you need. JunkMatcher installs JunkMatcher Central in your Applications folder. This application will allow you to configure preferences for the application and test out your own regular expression patterns to test against e-mail. Unlike SpamSieve, you do not have to have this application running at all times. It is merely the front-end for the main JunkMatcher application that is running in the background on your Mac.
JunkMatcher is a free download from their homepage.
Third Party Applications
One of the nice features of an Outlook/Exchange setup in the Windows world is Out of Office messages. This allows you to send an auto reply to anyone that sends you an e-mail letting that person know you are not there. Many people in the corporate sector rely on this to let their colleagues know their whereabouts at all times.
MacResponder from Bruno Blondeau is the Mac's answer to this feature. This application allows you to customize the rules to determine what message is sent based on the mail account, sender of the original message, subject, etc. When you plan on being out of the office, just tell MacResponder to start watching your Inbox. Every time you receive a message, it will check the message against the defined rules in MacResponder. If there is a match, it will send the auto reply.
MacResponder is $9.95 for a personal license and $19.95 for a professional. You can purchase it directly from the developer.
MailCountX allows you to have a count of unread e-mail on your OS X menu bar. If you are the type that keeps your menu-bar minimized when not in use, this could prove to be very useful. While still in beta, MailCountX is able to display a count for only your Inbox or all mailboxes, reminder beeps to inform you that you need to read all of that mail and the ability to adjust adjust the frequency of mail checking. The application has not been updated in almost six months, so your mileage may vary when you use it.
MailCountX is a free download.
Plug-Ins
MailPictures enhances Panther's ability to display your picture with any e-mail. When your recipient reads the e-mail in Mail, your picture shows up. Without this plugin, your picture would only show up if you had the picture set manually in the AddressBook. It is free and available from the developer's Web site.
MailEnhancer provides four functional enhancements to the Mail application. It allows the user to show the activity viewer whenever they manually check the e-mail, display a status dialog after doing a manual check and have the Dock icon count show all unread messages rather than just the unread messages in your Inbox. It also has a very useful feature that automatically changes the signature you use based on the e-mail account you send from. Getting this to work takes some effort, however.
Under Mail's preferences, go to the Signatures pane and make sure that "Show signature menu on compose window" is checked. Next, you need to rename all of your signatures to match whatever the e-mail address is. For example, if you have two e-mail addresses, justin@apple.com and justin@gmail.com, you need to create two signatures with those e-mail addresses as their respective names.
MailEnhancer is free and available for download.
MailPriority adds message priorities, message coloring and return receipts to Mail. You can edit the priority of your own messages under the Edit menu or by adding the new Priority menu item to your toolbar. Messages of certain priorities will show up as different colors. You can even colorize messages on your own via the contextual menu.
MailPriority is free and available from the developer's Web site.
Mail.appetizer is my favorite plugin of all of them. Appetizer creates a transparent popup notification on your screen with an excerpt of the message. This is great because I delegate the window to my second monitor and then, after looking, decide if I want to actually open the Mail and read it in its entirety, or wait until later. As of release candidate four, it now supports IMAP subfolders aside from just your Inbox.
Mail.appetizer is a free download.
If you are a Hotmail user, the http Mail plugin will allow you to check your Hotmail account from within Mail. As I don't have a Hotmail account, I have never tested this, so your mileage may vary.
Again, a free download from SourceForge.
The final plugin in our list is a feature that many Firefox users will appreciate. TypeAheadFind allows you to start typing in a mail message and the plugin will search for the phrase typed. No more having to open the Find panel to get the information you want.
TypeAheadFind is a free download as well.
The final add-on is a set of AppleScripts to enhance the functionality of Mail. Mail Scripts includes the following:
Add Addresses
- Add addresses found in the selected messages (in the header fields "From", "To", "Cc", and "Bcc") to the Address Book. This is much more flexible than the "Add Sender to Address Book" available in Mail and provides a convinient way for creating mailing lists.
Archive Messages (Mail)
- Move messages from the selected mailbox(es) to an archive mailbox or export them to standard mbox or plain text files for backup purposes or import into other applications. You can select to move all messages or only messages sent within or certain period as well filter messages based on their read and flagged status.
Change SMTP Server (Mail)
- Switch between different already defined SMTP servers or define a new one. This is especially useful if you are using your computer in more than one location and have to switch servers for several accounts at once.
Create Rule (Mail)
- Create a new rule based on the first of the selected messages. This saves you the trouble of copy/pasting address or other info between the message and the rule window and provides a much quicker way for setting up a rule with multiple criteria/actions.
Remove Duplicates (Mail)
- Locate all duplicate messages found in the selected mailbox(es) and move them to a separate mailbox for easy removal (duplicate matching is based on the unique message header "Message-Id").
Schedule Delivery (Mail)
- Allows you to send individual messages at predefined times (this script uses iCal for scheduling message delivery).
Send all Drafts (Mail)
- Immediately send all messages in the "Drafts" folders for all accounts. This saves you from having to open each draft in order to send it.
Open Mailbox, Open Message (Mail)
- Two small faceless scripts which will open mailboxes with new messages or the new messages themselves when run as a rule action.
Export Addresses (Address Book)
- Export addresses from the Address Book into tab-delimited text files. You can select which groups and which fields you want to export.
Search Addresses (Address Book)
- Find all addresses inside the Address Book matching one or more criteria. As opposed to the "Search" function built into the Address Book, this lets you search in any field as well as for empty and non-empty fields (Note: due to a bug in the Address Book's AppleScript implementation, "First Name" will always return a non-empty value for system versions of at least up to 10.3.2 - I have reported this bug to Apple and hope that they fix it with the next system update).
As an example, you might use this script to search for all phone numbers with a certain area code in order to update your contacts after an area code change.
Conclusion
As always, the Mac proves to be a very extensible platform. Developers have taken an application that comes with every single copy of MacOS X and added functionality to make it one of the best e-mail clients on the PC or the Mac. As always, if you find any errors or oversights in this article, please post it in the comments. If you think I should have included another plugin in my list, please let me know that as well.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (29)
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#1) On June 18, 2004 2:30 AM
That’s pretty cool man. I’ve never used Outlook, but I know that Thunderbird has plug-ins as well but there are only (literally) like four.
We in the Windows world will have to admit defeat :(
#2) On June 18, 2004 5:21 PM
Apple Mail is decent to use. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion:
(1) I hate the Mailboxes-in-drawer. I wish the folders list was incorporated into the window itself. I cannot find a way to switch between folders list and mail messages via keyboard. Also, the font used in the folders list is WAY too big. I wish I could control it so that I could see more folders at once.
(2) There is no easy way to hop to the next unread message via a single-click or a keystroke. Coming from a Claris Emailer background, I really miss this feature.
(3) I wish I could make “smarter” rules. For instance, I would like to perform logic operations like ((X and Y) or (M or (J and K))). Granted this almost treads into regular expressions, but I’m not asking for GREP (though that would be nice too). I was able to do this Emailer rather easily, and I want to same in Mail.
#3) On June 19, 2004 4:50 AM
My beef is that NOBODY ever gets live links from me from Mail. No matter how I send them. Plain text, unicode, Western. etc. etc.
#4) On June 19, 2004 2:31 PM
I totally agree about Mail.appetizer. I use it on my iBook with Desktop Manager (http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net), a virtual desktop utility. With Mail.appetizer active I leave Mail.app running in a separate (virtual) desktop and switch to a clean one to work with other applications and when new mail comes in I get the transparent pop-up on the desktop I’m working on without having to switch to the desktop where I left Mail.app. This saves a lot of time because you can tell at an instant if you need to switch desktops to attend to the mail, or just leave it for later.
#5) On June 24, 2004 3:36 AM
In addition to Matt I want to add, that I am using the same combination (Desktop Manager and Mail.appetizer).
Unfortunetly Mail crashes when clicking on the Mail.appetizer-Message while not using the virtual desktop Mail [.app] is running on.
If you are aware of that, it is no big deal, but still I wanted to let you all know.
#6) On June 24, 2004 10:00 AM
Hmm… doesn’t crash on my G3 800 iBook. If it did it would be rather less useful. Wonder if there is something else going on with your machine.
#7) On July 9, 2004 5:33 AM
After receiving a mail from the programmer of mail.appetizer - asking me for a detailed error-description - I’ve tried to reproduce the error and found out, that everything works fine with my pop3-and imap-accounts, the error occurs whenever I use teh combination while receiving new mail from our office-exchange-server.
so my problem with the combination of desktop manager and mail.appetizer might be personal.
just to straighten things up…
#8) On July 29, 2004 9:59 AM
Hi all,
Anyone have issues with Apple Mail application and MS Exchange Server?
I don’t know why, but all the Contact info inside the Exchange Public Folder never appears. I can see the directory tree but when expanded, it shows nothing.
Going through OWA or Outlook (OS9) display contact info without any problems.
Has anyone exprienced it also?
Or am I missing something?
Thanx in advance,
-pat
#9) On August 10, 2004 10:49 AM
Hi all,
Wondering if there is a plugin to allow HTML signatures in Apple’s mail.
Thanks in advance!
#10) On August 16, 2004 3:02 AM
I can’t get mail.appetizer to work with Desktop Manager. Anyone have any ideas? iMac Rev.D
Thanks
#11) On August 17, 2004 6:32 PM
http://www.nikwest.de/Software/index.html#MailPictures
MailPictures allows you to send HTML email.
#12) On August 22, 2004 9:38 AM
This website has not only a fine selection of tools and plug-ins for Apple’s Mail, but also an extensive Apple Mail wish list (you can add your own wish if you want).
#13) On September 23, 2004 2:54 PM
Hoi,
I was just wondering if there is something like “display subscribed folders only” for imap mailservers? because since I come from debian linux, and thats what the mail server is running and its not only a mail-server I have not only the mailboxes but a couple of hundred files in there.
Seeing them in the mailboxes list kindof … erm… stinks.
thx,
shocky
#14) On October 8, 2004 3:40 PM
i like that Mail is an Apple product and that it “plays well with others”… what i can’t stand is my mailboxes go Offline all the time, dozens of times each day. it’s infuriating. ISP says its the app, Apple supports says it’s the ISP’s fault. basically, i have great email service… when it’s up!
doc.theop
#15) On November 5, 2004 1:08 PM
I so agree with Emailer Fan
from June 18, 2004 05:21 PM, Emailer Fan said:
(1) I hate the Mailboxes-in-drawer. I wish the folders list was incorporated into the window itself. I cannot find a way to switch between folders list and mail messages via keyboard. Also, the font used in the folders list is WAY too big. I wish I could control it so that I could see more folders at once.
Mail App should AT THE VERY LEAST contain all the features of Outlook Express 4.5 and 5.
To not do so shows how much contempt Apple really has for its loyal users.
I’ve invested too much over the years into adobe and macromedia products especially. If I hadn’t I’d tell Steve Jobs & Apple to go take a flying leap into NeXt-hell.
#16) On November 5, 2004 1:09 PM
I so agree with Emailer Fan
from June 18, 2004 05:21 PM, Emailer Fan said:
(1) I hate the Mailboxes-in-drawer. I wish the folders list was incorporated into the window itself. I cannot find a way to switch between folders list and mail messages via keyboard. Also, the font used in the folders list is WAY too big. I wish I could control it so that I could see more folders at once.
Mail App should AT THE VERY LEAST contain all the features of Outlook Express 4.5 and 5.
To not do so shows how much contempt Apple really has for its loyal users.
I’ve invested too much over the years into adobe and macromedia products especially. If I hadn’t I’d tell Steve Jobs & Apple to go take a flying leap into NeXt-hell.
Actually, I think I already have told them. greedy jerks
#17) On November 14, 2004 11:49 PM
I have used Powermail in the past. Powermail had an add on script that allowed one to change the message subject. I found this to be quite useful for organizing mail messages.
Does Apple Mail have this functionality? I have yet to see an Applescript that allows one to change the message subject of a Apple Mail message.
#18) On May 5, 2005 6:13 AM
I cannot understand what are thought the developers of Mail2 to do the worst client of mail of the Internet history!!!!
I canｴt send Html messages
I canｴt format text, bold, cursive
I canｴt add tables or parragrafs
I canｴt use my digital certificate to sign the messages
I canｴt view source code to edit html
I canｴt create html signs
Outlook, Thunderbir and Eudora are more usable than Mail. In fact Mail2 is not usable and it is sooooooo slow !!!!! At this moment I think Mail2 is only for children, is not for professionals…
#19) On May 12, 2005 8:34 PM
best feature o lotusnotes was to see all messages in a single window when you wanted to.
my mac email mbox is 500mb and i’d like to be able to see all messages w attachments so i can thin the herd.
otherwise same unhappinesses as emilio’s and fed-up above
#20) On May 13, 2005 3:21 AM
dsdsdsdsdfsdfssdsdsd
#21) On May 15, 2005 1:43 PM
Well im using Mail 2 for Tiger - it looks great, is fast, love the new smart folders but its still missing functionality.
No HTML signature, so no pasting images into signatures etc - I switched to Mail from Entourage because of the interface and the less memory usage etc and of course because its not microsoft! But i may have to switch back now for this one little feature of HTML signatures. .. a disappointment.
#22) On May 16, 2005 7:55 PM
The Mail 2 in 10.4.1 breaks MailEnhancer, unfortunately. Which is a pity, since as far as I know it’s the only way to get a count of all unread mail in the dock icon.
#23) On May 17, 2005 4:42 PM
MailEnhancer in Mail 2, OSX 10.4.1
- Quit Mail
- In Finder, rename folder ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled) to ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
- In Terminal, type:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2
- Relaunch Mail
#24) On May 27, 2005 9:21 AM
Anyone find a plugin that’ll give you a basic formatting bar similar to word for selecting fonts, size, etc? A lot of people just don’t like that text pallet!
Jon
#25) On July 14, 2005 2:21 AM
After 20 years of PC I finally switched to MAC. I love it all but Mail2’s lack of a decent formatting bar to select fonts, size, bold, underline, italics, etc?
Thanks,
Tony
#26) On July 20, 2005 1:48 AM
Mailman, I found the following script which claims to be able to change the subject of emails in Mail:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041021072014781
It’s not exactly what you ask for and it reports to have some problems, but it might be a good start for scripting your own…
#27) On August 4, 2005 6:02 AM
I’ve just switcched to Apple after 15 years on PCs and so far so good. However, I must say that the Mail application is woeful. I preumed (fool that I am ) that Apple would be at least as feature and function rich as outlook, till I saw the pathetic address, book, no real formatting capability, limitations on e-mail signatures etc etc, and now I have to switch to back Entourage. The thing I love about Apple is simplicity and clarity, but in the case of Mail its more like childlike and patronising!
Ian
#28) On August 18, 2005 5:54 AM
cool site! excellent descriptions of these plugs. there’s another list at http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp but only has brief descriptions (still pretty good).
#29) On October 7, 2005 4:53 AM
does anyone knows an enhancement (script, etc.) that allows you to change the message subject?
=;\