05.10.04
Mail Enhancement
I came across this yesterday:
http://home.insightbb.com/~n9yty1/MailEnhancer/
Its got four options that it adds to Mail:
- Show activity viewer when doing a manual mail check.
- Display a status dialog after doing a manual mail check.
- Dock icon count shows all unread instead of just inbox unread.
- Automatically update signature to match sending address
I’ve installed this at home and it works great. I’ll be adding it to my iBook’s Mail as well. The option that super rocks is the automatic choice of signatures based on the e-mail address you’re sending from. This is something that I’ve been missing ever since I switched over from Eudora on OS 9.
I actually downloaded Eudora the other day with an eye to switching back. Mail’s handling of large volumes of mail has always bugged me and the lack of ‘personalities’ or ‘profiles’ that you can switch back and forth between easily really sucks. Eudora has some other cool features like great filters and a way of letting you know if a filter hasn’t been used in a long time. Three more things I miss about Eudora:
1) In Mail and Eudora, you can hit the space bar to ‘page down’ an e-mail. That works fine and on mail you can even use shift-space bar to ‘page up’. But in Eudora, if you hit the space bar when you’re already at the bottom of an e-mail, Eudora will close the mail you’re reading and open up the next unread mail automatically. It allows you to page through your new e-mail very quickly.
2) The mail transfer menu. It was really easy to sort your mail in Eudora when the list of mail boxes was right at the top of the menu. In Mail, there’s a Move To command but it’s buried underneath the Message menu. Sucky.
3) Eudora lets you edit the subject lines of mails that you’ve received. This sounds simple, but when you’re filing things away like passwords or other important stuff, being able to change the subject from “Re: FWD: [2] Re: I Can’t Get IN” to “New Password for FTP” make it much easier to find in your mail box.
But getting back into Eudora, I realized how creaky it is. I mean, Mail may be immature, but it’s got that built for OS X feel going for it. It’s like Eudora is in maintenance mode. I’m not sure it will ever be quite as tight with OS X as Mail already is. The display on screen feels old… Is it something to do with the Mishawaka font that Eudora uses?
So far there’s no perfect solution and I’ve got enough mail in Mail.app to stick with it. For now.