So far we’ve talked about adding a conversations view in Mail, using WideMail to make Mail more suited for our increasingly wide displays, and then cleaning up the IMAP folders that Gmail brings in. This post is all about adding little enhancements to Mail to give yourself a better organised Mail experience.
Colour Labels
Mail lets you organise by folders, but sometimes you need a more apparent visual representation of your different types of Mail. Using a combination of rules, scripts and a good ol’ keyboard shortcut, we can tag colour labels to our emails and at a glance know what the email is about.
To set a rule, simply go to your Mail Preferences » Rules, and after specifying the conditions, set the action as “Set Color” “of background” and then select a colour from the drop down list. In my case, I’ve set our private SA group mail which has a standard “XYZ” in the subject line, to get a light grey label so I instantly know that I have to ignore it and run for cover.
Now say there’s an email related to SA, but it wasn’t from one of our private groups. Simply hitting Command+Shift+C will bring up the Color palette, from where I can choose whatever colour I want. Now note that I have to choose from a 32bit colour palette instead of using a drop down list of specific colours. I have since saved all those colour labels as swatches inside the palette. You can check out this post for getting a lowdown on how to operate the colour palette.
Now if you don’t want to go the Color Palette way, you can use Applescripts to get the job done. Simply download these scripts, and dump them inside Home Folder » Library » Scripts » Applications » Mail. You will need to create those folders since they don’t exist. Open up your AppleScripts Utility using spotlight, and checkmark the “Show Scripts in Menubar” option. Now, whenever you are in Mail, you can access the scripts from the menubar and apply whatever colour label you so choose.
Notifications
You can either use Growl (and the built in Mail notifier), or better still get Mail Appetizer plugin. This plugin has been of great use and I couldn’t recommend it enough. It lets you mark an email read, delete it or open it up in Mail. The transparent HUD is hardly visible and not overtly distracting.
Searching
Mail’s has no apparently advanced search dialog box to narrow your searches down. However, using just the search bar, you can enter conditional searches like from:”Some Name” or email:from@me.com to narrow down your searches.
To search for two terms in an email, use the “&” operator. For instance, searching for “Andy & Milind” will bring up all results with both these words are mentioned. The OR operator on the other hand is the “|” key. A few other operators like the NOT “!” operator that seem to have been excluded from the new Mail application in Leopard.
Of course, Mail has evolved pretty well to narrow down on the right email just by entering search terms in the search bar so you probably wouldn’t need these.
Speed up Mail
Steve Weintraub has created a clever Automator (based on an AppleScript no longer available) workflow “Mail Vacuum“ that cleans out the Mail storage database thereby improving the performance of the Mail application. If you have a very large database, this will dramatically reduce time required to switch between folders, emails and the overall Mail application.
Just download the script, open it with Automator and run it. You can also set it as a recurring script in iCal to run this on a monthly basis, the instructions for which are on the download page.
We’re still testing out some other Mail plugins that will further extend the Smoking Apples Mail saga, but in the the mean time you can of course check out HawkWings.net, a useful resource for all things Apple Mail. The author has stopped updating the blog for a while, but the site already has plenty of resources. If you have any tips and suggestions for a better Mail experience, do share them with us.
