If there are problems with information in your mailboxes, it may be necessary to reindex your messages. During this process, certain Mail folders on your computer are moved to another location, such as your desktop. When Mail is reopened, it rereads and reindexes all messages in all local mailboxes. The reindexing process can take several minutes depending on how many messages are in your local mailboxes.

When Mail detects a problem with your mailboxes, it may alert you that it needs to repair them by reindexing your messages. At other times, you can reindex messages yourself. To do so, quit Mail and, in the Mail folder in your home Library folder, move the Envelope Index file and any folders that begin with “Mac-”, “Exchange-”, or “IMAP-” to a different location, such as your desktop. When you reopen Mail, it reindexes all messages.

In some cases, you might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages in the mailbox–for example, if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages by searching. Rebuilding a mailbox can take awhile; it’s recommended for fast Internet connections only.

To rebuild a selected mailbox:

Choose Mailbox > Rebuild.

For IMAP accounts, locally cached messages and attachments are discarded and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your computer. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.

Adjusting Column Widths

In many programs, what you see on the screen is presented in columns. Good examples of this are spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel and Apple’s Numbers) and mail readers (Microsoft Entourage and Apple’s Mail.app). Adjusting these columns isn’t necessarily obvious, so here is how  you do it:

Place your cursor carefully on the dividing line between the column headings (Mail.app’s headings are shown below, but the idea is the same regardless of the application).

The cursor will change into a vertical line with horizontal arrows coming from each side. An enlarged picture of the cursor is shown.

When the cursor changes, you can drag horizontally. Doing so makes the column to the left of your cursor wider or narrower.

What is interesting about this activity is watching the computer scramble to rewrite it’s information to fit the space you give it. For example, as you make the Date Received column narrower, “Monday, November 2, 2009, 1:43 PM” Shrinks first to “Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 1:43 PM” to “11/2/09, 1:43 PM and finally to the terse “11/2/09.”

Rearranging Columns in Mail.app and Entourage.

Once you’ve adjusted the width of each column, you might want to change which columns are shown or the order in which the columns are shown. This is slightly different in each application, but the general idea is the same.

Mail.app: To change the order of the columns, place the cursor over the column header and the cursor will change to  a hand. Click and hold; then drag horizontally to change the order. To add or remove columns, use the View menu and choose Columns and then check or uncheck the columns you want to add or remove. To change the sort order, click on the column header to reverse the sort. Click again to sort the opposite way.

Entourage: Entourage makes this confusing, because depending on where your preview pane is the functionality changes. If your preview pane is on the right, you will not have the option to change the columns, but only to change the the sort method. If your preview pane is below, then you can change the order of the columns by clicking and dragging horizontally (you’ll see the hand cursor); change the sort order by clicking on the column header, and choose which columns are shown in the View -> Columns menu.

Forcing Mail.app to show plain text messages (and not show the rich text portion)

If you’ve ever wanted to stop looking at all the pretty rich text email messages and show only the plain text portion of an email, you can force your machine to do that.

First, though a little background. Inside of every rich text email message lies buried a plain text copy of the core contents of the message. If you mail client (usually Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage) can show it (and these do) then it will prefer the html formatted message over the plain text. Its easy to force Mail or Entourage to send messages as plain text, but how do you get Mail to to receive messages that way? Read on…

To force incoming mail to display in plain text by default (which isn’t possible for all messages), you need to quit Mail, open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command: defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE. To switch to styled text (if available) when viewing a plain-text message, choose View -> Message -> Best Alternative.

via The seven most underused Mail features | Business Center | Working Mac | Macworld.

How often do you come across a piece of software that does exactly what you want it to do? Well it seems that iconCompo has provided me with the means to do something I’ve wanted to do ever since getting my Mac. Now I actually quite like Leopard’s minimalist cool blue colour scheme for it’s folder icons. I ust wished there was a way to ‘emboss’ selected folder icons with something that gives a clue as to the contents so that I don’t have to scan the labels underneath. I still want the folder icon to be clearly visible so that I know it’s a folder (rather than an app or an archive for example), but some extra visual cues would be nice.Similarly I don’t want anything too colourful as that can be distracting.

So it was almost by accident that I ended up downloading iconCompo. I was looking at another icon editing app on MacUpdate and I happened to look at the ‘Other People Suggest’ where someone had mentioned iconCompo. A few minutes later I was staring at a very simple interface with three boxes on it thinking ‘what comes next’? Well the premise is very simple – box #1 represents one layer, box #2 represents another layer and box #3 represents the result, which is the essence of how you come up with a customized folder icon that combines the image you want with Leopard’s standard folder icon, as the picture below demonstrates.

iconCompo

So for example, to create a customized folder icon for the folder where Email Backup Pro stores backups of my mail file, I pasted the Mail.app icon into box #1, the default folder icon into box #2 and hey presto…! However, the capabilities of the program don’t end there. You can resize and reposition images, as well as changing the hue, saturation, brightness etc. I wanted to stick with Leopard’s blue colour theme so I altered the top layer of each of my custom icons to give it a blue hue, and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Start small, then go for it!

I then decided to have some real fun and create custom folder icons for TV shows I have recorded through EyeTV. You could just as easily create custom icons for your favourite bands, or anything else.

How about folder icons for your favourite TV shows?

iconCompo has a lot more features than I have described here. For example you can alter the pitch and angle of each layer, you can add text (written in any direction), and of course you don’t just have to create custom folder icons – you can combine any two images you like. Your imagination is your only limit.

Your Mail accounts, rules, signatures, and Smart Mailboxes preference settings can easily be backed up. Tip: All Mail-related preference files should be backed up or restored as a group.

* To back up:

Note: These steps back up Mail preferences, but do not back up Mail messages (emails), although you can do that with the .Mac Backup utility. See below if you want to manually back up Mail messages (mailboxes).
1. Create a uniquely-named folder on your desktop (or other favorite location). For example, you might call it “Mail Prefs Backups May_15_2005″ (adding a date is a good idea).
2. Quit Mail if it’s running.
3. In the Finder choose Home from the Go menu.
4. Open the Library folder.
5. Open the Preferences folder.
6. Copy the “com.apple.mail.plist” file to the folder you made in step 1 by Option-dragging the file. Don’t remove the original file from its current location (this file contains your Mail accounts information).
7. Close the Preferences folder.
8. Open the Mail folder.
9. Copy the “MessageRules.plist” file to the folder you made in step 1 by Option-dragging the file (this file contains your Mail rules).
10. Copy the “SmartMailboxes.plist” file to the folder you made in step 1 by Option-dragging the file (you guessed it, this file contains Smart Mailboxes information).
11. Finally, copy the Signatures folder to the folder you made in step 1 by Option-dragging the folder. (Your custom signatures, if you use them, are stored here.)
* To restore:

Move all copies of the files and folders from your uniquely-named folder to the original locations from which they came, as listed above.

To manually back up Mail messages (emails)

You might wish to manually back up all your Mail messages from time-to-time. To back up entire mailboxes (where Mail stores messages), such as your Inbox, follow these steps:

1. Quit Mail if it’s open.
2. From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Home.
3. Open the Library folder.
4. Copy the folder “Mail” to your backup location, such as a different volume or burnable disc. Important: Do not remove the Mail folder from ~/Library. If you’re backing up to the same volume, hold the Option key as you drag the folder to make a copy instead of moving it (a “+” cursor appears).

Problem: you open a new email but the text displays as complete garbage.
Solution: mark it as Unread, then relaunch Mail.app.

Friends, after moving from MacBook to a Windows Vista Laptop, I’ve been absolutely handcuffed by Outlook’s terrible IMAP implementation, and I simply refuse to return to using POP3 mail and having to “sync” it everywhere manually.  It’s simply not worth the effort, when I already have my own IMAP server, and can store as much data as I want.  Currently i have about 4 years worth of archived mail on my server, so I can’t go around syncing all that to every computer!

In any case, after several attempts at working with Outlook using various add-ons, including the Bynari Connector, I’ve decided to drop it altogether and give Thunderbird a shot.

So far, the installation process is easy, and the application loads 100X faster than Outlook. 

However, one issue I already see is that in order to import mail from Outlook, it opens Outlook in the background, but only for a moment.  Since it has done that the import process has hung, and I may have to restart.

Note to the developer community – PLEASE SOMEONE PORT Mail.app from Apple (used to be Claris Emailer) to Windows… I’ll pay money for it if it really does EVERYTHING as well as it does on OS X.  Strange that Apple should be this good at EMail.  Windows Outlook was always the leader – but I guess that’s because we never knew how much better it could be.  How much SIMPLER!

Then again, hopefully after my tax refund, and maybe once I get a more substantial income, I’ll just buy a MacBook and forget about Windows altogether, except to have one running on a VM so I can do testing or client troubleshooting.

With Google and Dropbox, you can easily replicate most of the functionality of Apple’s old .mac service. As for MobileMe, I don’t own an iPhone, so I can’t speak to the sync features that MobileMe provides for the iPhone. If you have several Macs (and even PCs) that you want to keep in sync, see my tutorial.

I love my macs.  With my friends and collegeaus I’ve become the guy to go to with Mac questions.  One frequent question is how do I use Mac mail.app?  Most of these questions are coming from former Outlook users who aren’t used to an intelligent UI.  While Mail.app is an outstanding stand alone there are some plug-ins that can make it even better.  Here’s my current setup.

1.  Letterbox.  The Letterbox plugin for mail.app takes advantage of the widescreen format of your monitor by placing the inbox and the email side by side instead of top to bottom.  You can switch back and forth through preferences.  This is especially helpful when working on smaller macbook screens.

2.  Mail Tags.  This adds lots of functionality.  It allows you to tag or label mail similar to labels in Gmail.  You can set up mail rules to have mail tagged as it comes in.  I set up a mail tag project for each church planter I work with and have it automatically tag the mail as it comes in.  I then set up a smart folder to automatically file the email.  From mail tags you can also type additional notes about the email.  Another handy feature is the ability to create a new event or to do from mail tags.  The event or to do that is created will have a hyperlink back to the email.  It is $29.99, but easily doubles the productivity of mail.app.

3.  Mail Act-On.  Mail Act-On lets you define custom hotkeys for Mail.  I like to keep my inbox clutter free.  I’m anal that way.  I really like the Archive functionality of Gmail.  So I created an archive folder.  I use Act-On to create a keyboard shortcut to make the action quicker.  You can also file emails to folders by using the keyboard rather than the mouse.  There are two versions.  The new version is 24.95 which is a little pricy.  The old version accomplishes the above and is free.

4.  Attachment Scanner.  This plugin keeps you from sending an email without your attachment.  Its saved me several times.  NOTE: The link above is not where I’ve normally downloaded it from.  It does appear to be the same plugin though.

These plug-ins make my mail.app experience 10 times better.  There are lots of other tweaks out there so chances there are others you will want to try.  A nice of available plugins can be found here.

As well regarded as Apple’s Mail.app is, it’s one program I don’t think I’ll be using. Google’s Gmail won me over years ago, and it’s only improved since then! I love the threaded conversations, and that’s something Mail.app doesn’t do. The one reason I might have considered Mail.app was for it’s offline abilities… but now Gmail has begun to support that feature, too. Google gets the win in this category from me.

One area where I could be tempted though is my calendar. Again, Google Calendar rules my life right now, but it sounds like there will be room for Apple’s iCal, too. Both companies seem to have gone out of their way to support each others’ products. A few months ago Google started supporting the CalDAV protocol. From everything I’ve read, it’s a pretty easy job to link Google Calendar to iCal so that updates to one are reflected in the other. As in: I enter an event on the Google website, and the next time I open iCal, it appears on the given day. Or else I add an appointment in iCal, and the next time I log in to Google, the appointment is in the calendar. All that stuff is pretty strait forward. What I’m really excited about is all the other apps that will integrate with iCal on my Mac. For instance, now when my GTD program The Hit List adds something to iCal, Googles will get it. I think there’s a possibility of some really deep integration here.

Furthermore, all this should make syncing to my iPod Touch much easier, too. My current bubblegum and shoelaces setup is sloppy and imperfect. On the PC side, I import my Google calendar into Outlook 2003 with a free add-on called SyncMyCal. SyncMyCal works pretty well, and allows importing of multiple Google Calendars. That part is critical. The contacts are a little more tedious to deal with: I delete all contacts from Outlook, export the 500 contact list from Google, then import into Outlook. I only have the patience to do this about once  a month. Once Outlook is up to date, I tell iTunes to import contacts and calendars upon iPod sync. Somewhere in the process something is breaking down, though. All new events seem to make it to the iPod, but if an event is cancelled or removed from the online calendar, it never seems to get removed from the iPod. I’d call that a major flaw, but it only affects me occasionally. I may be causing this error myself somehow, but I have no idea where it’s happening. In any case, once the iMac is up and running, I think all this will be automated. iCal will refresh itself from Google’s servers as often as I tell it to (maybe every hour?). Address Book should be able to sync with Google automagically, too. To me, this kind of automation and simplification is a big reason for switching to the Mac.

It’s also worth mentioning here that all the Google services are free. Even if MobileMe came included with the Mac, I might still prefer Google. When there’s a $120 difference and the syncing is this good, it’s a no-brainer.

Update: WordPress pointed me to an interesting related article here from 2006. Jeff has had most of his wishes granted so far!

In most cases I would say that ok/cancel dialogs that challenge a user’s intention are anoying and unnecessary. There are time however when I’m thankful that UX designers consider challenging my actions, to wit:

Thank you Mail.app I would rather not open the one thousand eight hundred seventy six emails that I inadvertently highlighted just before I hit the enter key.

Having recently added a new hard drive to the Mac, I thought I’d check its ‘SMART’ status just to make sure everything was OK. There’s a neat little app called SMARTReporter that sits on the menu bar and alerts you if any of your drives start to feel a sick – probably long before you experience any data loss. It sends output to the Console at specified intervals, so when I asked for the status of all my drives, SMARTReporter kindly opened the console for me. Having checked everything was normal, I went on to launch Mail.app to check for mail. As luck would have it, the Console was still open and up popped this message:

08/03/2009 21:29:05 Mail[1322]  DEVONMailConduit 1.2.1 loaded

What? DEVONMailConduit is loading when I launch Mail.app? But I don’t have any DEVON products installed. Ahh, but I did try out DEVONThink Pro a few months back and it seems that even though I thought I’d uninstalled it OK, there were still (quite a few) traces of it left behind. So let’s start with the message above – it’s obviously a mail plug-in so where better to look than in the <username>/Library/Mail/Bundles folder and sure enough there it was… DEVONMailConduit.mailbundle nestling inside. It’s then just a simple task to delete it and then relaunch Mail.app to check the console and make sure it’s gone.

Next up, there’s cached data that DEVONThink Pro left behind. So, it’s off to my <username>/Library/Caches/Metadata folder and what do we find? Yes it’s a DEVONThink Pro folder – not huge, but something I don’t need, so to the trash it goes.

DEVONThink Pro scripts

Now part of how DEVONThink Pro works is by integrating itself with various aspects of your system. This means that there will be scripts allowing you to ‘clip’ things to DEVONThink amongst other things. Sure enough, I found no less than 2 more folders and 34 DEVONThink scripts on my system, as you can see from the picture. Same treatment, ‘move to trash’!

Having done a few more checks, I think that’s all traces of DEVONThink Pro removed from my Mac. Now when I search on ‘devon’ all I see is a dictionary entry for a small county in southwestern England.

This isn’t a criticism of DEVONThink Pro, many other apps are the same – it just goes to show that when you install an app there is often a lot more to it than what gets put in your Applications folder. Software like AppZapper does help, but be prepared to get your hands dirty if you want to remove all traces of some programs. Also it’s a good idea to move the files and folders in question to a safe place and then to check your Mac is still running smoothly before finally consigning them to the trash bin… just in case!

Why don’t I use DEVONThink Pro? Well it’s a great program, it’s just that at the time it was overkill for what I needed, although I’m now re-visiting it as it happens to use as a document management platform. I’m currently using Evernote for storing all my web clippings, notes and odd bits of information. It’s free, cross-platform plus you can sync it to your iPhone after a fashion. Horses for courses though, so check ‘em both out.

Yet again I’m having IMAP problems with our Groupwise 7 server and my Mail.app client. My Sent Items folder refuses to sync. I’ve even completely reset Mail.app, and I still have the problem. What’s confusing me is I don’t have the problem with any other client such as my iPhone’s Mail.app or Thunderbird on my Mac.

It seems that Mail.app is stuck in “synchronize” mode. So, first I quit Mail.app. Using the Groupwise for Mac, I moved all of my Sent Items out of my Sent Items folder into a different folder (I used Cabinet), then quit Groupwise for Mac. I re-opened Mail.app and saw all of the emails in the Cabinet IMAP folder. From there, I dragged them into the Sent (Sent Items) folder, and all seems to be ok again.

Until next time!…

Do we need another Mac email client? Well, the folks at Postbox believe we do. They have taken the core of Thunderbird 3, reskinned it, added some goodies and given us something new to use.

Is Postbox ready for primetime? Well, let’s weigh in on the merits of this new app. Essentially, Postbox wants to be your central hub for managing all things email, with a new twist – integration of additional functionality (tags, integrated maps and more).

Postbox takes a different approach to managing conversations of email. Rather than talking about it, let’s have a look at some screenshots. Please note, these screenshots are from the Postbox web site. I am one of those Inbox Zero folks, so showing you my inbox would be pointless…

Features

In a new way of looking at email, Postbox provides the ability to view your inbox and other folders as individual tabs. Yes, this is also a new feature in Thunderbird 3.0, although the presentation really works in helping to interact with the deluge of email we all see from multiple email accounts.

Postbox Multiple Tabs

Of the standout features in Postbox, the Conversation View is very powerful. Being able to see your entire conversation a la GMail is very handy. This is a feature that Mail.app sorely lacks and I hope we get to see when Snow Leopard ships.

Postbox Conversation View

Another great feature is the Compose Sidebar. This handy tool has an integrated search for attachments (you can insert any attachment from another email message), photos – with the caveat of local disk(s) or from Picasa.

Postbox Compose Window with Sidebar

Another standout feature that many mail clients should have is the ability to add notes to messages. Postbox includes an annotation tool to do just that.

Postbox Mail Message Annotation Tool

Postbox has many more features, including message tags (similar to MailTags), support for Growl and a powerful message search that uses operators similar to Gmail. For example, from:Matthew.

Postbox Search

Alternatives & Comparisons

Postbox is an interesting new player in the email client space. Other competitors to Apple’s Mail.app that offer richer (smarter) functionality include Outspring Inc’s Outspring Mail. In fact, Outspring Mail takes a different approach to managing your inbox my applying intelligence to message handling (automatic filing) rather than using manual tagging.

If you are a Mail.app person running Leopard, then moving to Postbox can pose challenges. For one, there is no QuickLook support. Further, there is also no integration with the iLife suite (for adding photos, movies, etc.). Less importantly, there is no stationary support. On a positive note, Postbox does integrate with Address Book.

If you use MobileMe, Postbox doesn’t support MobileMe aliases natively. Microsoft Entourage 2008 has a similar problem. The workaround is to create separate accounts for each alias (which just adds to the visual clutter).

If you use the Daylite Productivity Suite and its integration into Mail.app, you won’t be able to archive your email messages outside of Postbox. This might not be an issue for some, although it is fundamental to my daily work.

Conclusion

Remember, Postbox is still in beta, so do be careful. I ran into a few glitches where by selecting a header while reading my inbox, my email messages were deleted. Thankfully, they were just moved to the Deleted Messages folder. However, this was somewhat disconcerting, especially when the email is from your Editor…

Most importantly, it is unclear is how the folks at Postbox plan to monetize the product. Will it have a license fee? Will it have an advertisement model? These questions remain unanswered and should cause you to heavily consider using the product.

When I asked the folks at Postbox, I received an answer from their PR team telling me that they do not have a monetization model yet and will be working with the beta community to figure one out. One word: scary. The beta testers get to be the guinea pigs for the monetization model too? Nice.

As an another example, Outspring Mail has a retail price of $59. Leopard retail is $129. You do the math and ask if it is worth spending the additional dollars for a “suped-up” email client.