Widescreen monitors have taken the market by storm in the last couple of years. Apple’s entire lineup is widescreen and almost every monitor being sold these days is a widescreen one. So why is Apple Mail still designed to work better with monitors sporting a standard aspect ratio?

Thankfully, the WideMail plugin, developed by Dane Harnett, solves that problem, and brilliantly at that. WideMail not only moves your message viewer to the side but introduces another interface element that formats your message headers in a special “WideMail” column. What you are left with is a clean three column layout that makes full use of your widescreen monitor. 

WideMail also comes with a separate preference pane so that you can customise the whole look to your liking. In the General preferences, you can adjust the spacing between the message cells, have them use alternate colours, and add grids lines to them. You can also quickly move your message viewer back to the bottom, its original place, if you feel like. 

The formatting pane allows you to customise the way the WideMail Column is shown. You can remove elements like date and subject, and even adjust the spacing using one of the many little devices in the cloud. And just so you know, the default settings for all this is configured just right so you don’t even have to customise anything. This guy is certainly taking tips from Apple!

Remember, though, that once you install the plugin, you need to enable the WideMail Column and disable the other columns. To do that, you’ll have to right click on the column bar (immediately above your messages) and deselect the columns like Subject, Date, and Sender, and enable the “WideMail Column”. 

What’s more? You could combine this view with the threaded conversations tip I mentioned earlier to make your entire inbox a sleek and organised place for all your conversations.

The plugin, at version 0.5.1, is a free download and requires Leopard for (who uses Tiger anyway?). If you do use it on a regular basis, consider donating something as your token of appreciation and to support the continued development of the project.