You will find 140+ plugins, add-ons, scripts and helpful apps here. That's a lot. A Top Ten list might help you get started. Otherwise, choose one of the categories below. Browse. Enjoy!
Categories:
Notification | Added functionality | Integration with other apps | Spam Tools | Interface tweaks | Archiving | Leopard Mail Templates | Switching | Address Book | iCal | Miscellaneous
Notification
 Announce Sender. George Sudarkoff has written an AppleScript that will announce the name of an email’s sender on its arrival in Apple Mail. As he says: “It pauses iTunes if it’s playing, speaks the name of the sender if the message is not marked as junk and then resumes the playback.” The script is easy to set up and operate. George provides full instructions on his blog.
 DockStar is a utility that allows you to assign a separate notification badge to different mailboxes, giving you more information about your unread messages than Apple Mail can by default. You can assign a badge to up to 5 different mailboxes, choose from four different shapes, set the the size of each badge and select colour you want for each mailbox. The result is a riot of notification badges, undeniably more colourful and possibly more informative. DockStar is shareware (USD 8). Tiger. Leopard.
 GmailStatus is a Menubar app that notifies you of new emails in a Gmail account. There’s nothing revolutionary about that, but GmailStatus has some nice features that set it apart from GmailNotifier. It allows you to see the number of new emails by label and to open them in a browser.It also has support for a user-defined hotkey and shows you your account usage when you hover the mouse of the menubar icon. Donation-ware. Tiger. Leopard.
 GMail Notifier loads a small envelope icon into the menubar. A drop-down menu allows you to monitor your Google Calendar, poll your Gmail account for new mail, jump to your inbox or to the compose window in Gmail’s web interface. If it detects unread mail in your Gmail account, an unread message count appears in brackets next to the icon. Tiger. Leopard.
 Gmail+Growl is an expanded version of GMail Notifier, which works with Growl to provide “flash-up notifications” on your screen as mail arrives for you in your GMail account. Rather like Mail Appetizer does for Apple Mail. Growl is a program that provides notifications, or on-screen messages, when events occur in programs. You will need to install Growl as well for this to work.
 HTTPMail allows you to send and receive email from MSN and Hotmail servers. It comes in Jaguar, Panther and Tiger flavours. Once installed, various Hotmail-type options can be configured in its Apple Mail preferences pane. It is freeware. It is possible that this will only work with loder Hotmail accounts or "Premium" Accounts. See the long discussion thread on the Apple Discussion Board.
 iAlert is a system preference pane that enables notification for a range of apps, including iTunes, Safari, Firefox, Thunderbird, Entourage and most importantly, Apple Mail. It runs on top of SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet. A copy of SIMBL in included in iAlert’s disk image and must be installed first. Very pretty smoked-glass alerts. No longer supported.
 iFaces is a notification utility for Apple Mail that lets you know about new email by displaying the Address Book image of the sender on the Desktop. The Preferences screen allows you to set a number of options including the transparency of the pane and a custom image for emails from people without pictures in your Address Book.
 iNotify.saver is a screensaver that polls your Mail.app accounts (.Mac, POP and IMAP all supported) for unread messages and keeps track of the number of your iChat buddies who are online. You can run it over a “basic black” background or over one of the preset Mac OS X screensavers. It does look nice.
Notify.saver is freeware, although the developer warns that it may cost you karma if you use it a lot without donating.
 MacBiff is a “biff” program that sits in the menubar and polls multiple IMAP accounts for new mail. Unlike many notification utilities, though, it takes full advantage of the functions and flexibility of IMAP servers and folders, allowing you to choose which folders it should watch. The ability to open a message in Mail.app from the subject line displayed in MacBiff would make it even better, but if you are looking for a powerful and flexible mail-check utility for your IMAP accounts that also works with Growl, you will want to check this out. MacBiff is freeware.
 MacFreePOPs is a stand-alone app which allows you to download your emails from web-based mail services like Yahoo, hotmail and Gmail. It is a version of the FreePops app for Mac OS X 10.2 and above, and works by translating local POP3 requests into HTTP actions. It currently offers support for Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, hotmail, Gmail, AOL, lycos.co.uk and others, and more are planned. It is freeware.
 MailAppetizer displays a splash screen when a new email arrives, complete with header info, the initial text of the email and an Address Book picture of the sender if you have one. Options at the bottom of the splash screen allow you to view the message in mail, mark it read, delete it, or dismiss the notification window. Download the latest version (1.2 beta 4) from Bronson Beta.
 MailCountX. Another utility that tracks your unread emails and displays the total in the menubar. Not as polished as MailUnreadStatusBar nor as customisable. It's been in beta since December 2003, which doesn't bode well for future development. I list it here for the sake of completeness, although I can't see why any one would choose to use it. Download it from SqueakSoft.com.
 Mail Forward is a stand-alone app that will forward your email from AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo! or from any POP account (to, say, Apple Mail). It doesn’t work with as many providers as MacFreePOPs and it’s not donation-ware, but to me it seemed easier to configure and use. It works by accessing your web mail or POP mailbox and then forwarding each email onto your chosen account through your SMTP mail server.
 Mail Status Control displays the number of unread messages in Apple Mail next to its icon in the Statusbar. The message count display can be configured to show only the inbox or all unread messages. Mail Status Control has a number of other settings that you can determine, including the ability to set keyboard shortcuts for checking mail, launching a new message and showing Mail.app
 MailUnreadStatusBar.This excellent plug-in puts a little icon of the Apple Mail stamp in your menubar that lists the number of unread emails you have. You can customise which folders it tracks, and the icon's drop down menu lists the unread mail by folder, allowing you to jump right to the folder you want or need to read. It's my favourite utility of its kind, and it's free. Download it from QueueSoft.
 Mail Unread Menu sits in your Menubar and polls for unread messages at a user-definable period. When it finds some, the number of emails is displayed next to its icon. Menubar utilities like this are less distracting than the notification provided by Growl or Mail.Appetizer. Mail Unread Menu only works if Mail.app is running. The most recent version adds an option to monitor all mailboxes or just your inbox. Universal binary and freeware (donations not refused).
 MailWidget checks your POP3 email account every time Dashboard is activated — without having Apple Mail running all the time. It remembers which email was received the last time Apple Mail was started; other widgets might say something like “there are 88 messages on the mail server” but only MailWidget will tell if there are new emails that hadn’t already been received by Apple Mail.
 PowerMate MailPulse is a widget for Konfabulator (remember that?) which checks Mail.app for unread email every specified number of seconds.
When you have unread mail, your Griffin PowerMate will pulse depending on how many unread emails are in your inbox(es) until all new mail has been read. Obviously you need to have a Griffin PowerMate for this to be useful.
Spoken Notification of new mail. Todd Ditchendorf has written an AppleScript which, when attached to a rule in Apple Mail, will speak the name and sender’s email address. By default “Victoria” does the talking, but you can set it to any of OS X’s voices by editing the script. Todd provides instructions on his blog for setting up the rule to launch the script.
 Widgets. Notification widgets for Tiger are numerous. There are at least five for GMail alone, of which GPeek seems to be the most flexible, although GMail Checker is cute. eCheck claims to poll almost any kind of email account in existence, but costs money. Other notable widgets include MailPop which checks GMail and promises .Mac support soon, flores which adds a flower to a virtual vase for every unread email, and My Yahoo! for mail and headlines from a yahoo account. I could go on, but I won't.
 Ymail provides menu-bar notification for emails in your Yahoo! Mail account. Like Gmail Notifier for Gmail users, it offers a much better notification option (IMHO) than the various widgets that do the same job. Launching the app loads a “Y” into the menubar which provides a drop-down menu full of options. It's a good option for those times and in those environments when you can’t use Apple Mail. Ymail is free and open source (the code is also available).
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Added Functionality
 Apple Mail Signature Generator is a Perl script which uses Fortune to create as many signatures as you like by creating a new signatures.plist for your Mail app.
To execute the script, all you need to do is drop it into an open Terminal window and type ‘perl mailsig.pl’. It works in Panther as wellas in Tiger. The creator rashly offers to provide email support.
Burst Mailing List script. This applescript for Mail.app will take one or more selected MIME digest messages and extract the individual messages from the digest message. This is especially useful if you are subscribed to a mailing list in digest format but want to reply to a single message in the digest rather than the digest message itself. The individual messages will be moved to the same mailbox as the original digest message and the temporary Import folder will be deleted. Freeware.
 Chibi Ninja, a new app released yesterday, might be for you. It allows you send an encrypted message (and image if you want) through Apple Mail which the recipient can decode using the same password you encrypted it with. This offers you the choice of one of four encryption standards or ciphers — desx (192 bits) and 128 bit versions of blowfish, cast or rc5 — for the message and a box to enter your chosen password. Chibi Ninja is cross-platform, which means that this process will work for messages received on any kind of computer. It is freeware
 CRM4Mac brings iCal, Address book and Apple Mail together into one interface. It also allows you to link documents and log phone calls with particular contacts in your Address Book. A new version, CRM4Mac 2.0, features Spotlight support and other improvements. CRM4Mac doesn’t modify the apps themselves, but simply combines them so that all your events and emails are displayed together, according to date by default. (No longer in development  )
 Email Merge makes email-outs easy by integrating a database with Apple Mail (OS X 10.3 or greater) to produce individualised invoicing, sales, list management, student grading and personal messages. Emails can be sent from different accounts and attachments can be included in the messages. A June 2005 update added extra features. A single licence costs USD 39.
 Email Reports is a stand-alone AppleScript app that provides stats on your email. Currently it produces a hyperlinked chart containing the people in your Address Book, the last message they sent you, and the last message you sent them. The chart is colour-coded, with different colours showing the length of time since you last corresponded with each person. This is in active development and due to gain more features. The developer welcomes feedback and suggestions.
 EnScrypt is a series of AppleScript modules that offer encryption for emails and text. Using the “Blowfish” 128-bit encryption algorithm, it can encrypt Apple Mail messages, TextEdit or Word files, with the promises of support to come for more apps and file formats. It also includes the SHA1 algorithm for digital signatures and comes in the form of a stand-alone app with its own installer.
Fuhgeddaboutit is an AppleScript that creates a To Do item in iCal from an Apple Mail message. After highlighting an email, you can select Fuhgeddaboutit from the AppleScript Menu or press its predefined keyboard shortcut (Control+2) and the script will launch a series of option boxes from which you can select the appropriate calendar, due date, summary and priority.
 GPGMail adds PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) functionality to Apple Mail. Acting as the front end of the gpg encrypter, it allows you to read and send PGP authenticated and/or encrypted messages. You can use GPGMail for plain text and MIME messages, following RFC 3156. If you do not know what any of this means, then this plug-in is probably not for you. (I don't know what it means either).
GTDMail is an Apple Script that adds a classic GTD "Tickler file" to your Apple MailMailbox Drawer. The first time you run the script, it creates a full set of folders for you. File your emails away in the appropriate folder, and then run the script every day, and it sorts through your folders and delivers the stored emails (flagged and marked as unread) into the @INBOX each day as you need to deal with them. GTDMail is freeware.
 IMAP-IDLE plugin. Michael Rothwell has written a plugin for Mail.app that adds support for IMAP’s IDLE command. This feature allows the server to tell Mail.app when new mail arrives rather than Mail needing to poll the server. As Michael explains, "It opens a connection for each IMAP account, selects the INBOX, enters IDLE mode, and waits for messages. When it gets a message from the server indicating that new mail has arrived, it causes Mail.app to check for new mail in that account." Works with any IMAP4 mail server that supports IDLE. Freeware.
 iSay records spoken messages which it then packages up as attachments to an email. It is not really a plug-in. It’s a stand-alone app, but it plays so beautifully with Apple Mail, that it is worth a mention. he preference pane allows you to integrate it with iCal, to choose a default encoding for the messages (WAV, MPEG-4, ulaw, or 3GPP) and to set hotkeys. Compare with iVoiceMail. Shareware (USD 20).
 iVideoMail is a plugin that offers video recording and posting options in Mail.app. It installs itself as a Preference pane in Mail.app. The pane allows you to select the size (320×240, 240×180, 160×120), codec (MPEG 4, Apple’s H264, Sorensen 3) and compression ratio for your video recordings. You can install its icon into your Composing window using the Customize Toolbar option. Clicking on that icon opens a video recording dialog with options for specifying the video source. iVideoMail is shareware (USD 10).
 iVoiceMail is a plugin bundle for Apple Mail that enables the recording of voice messages sent as audio clips in a Mail.app message. It installs itself as a preference pane in Mail.app. The plugin redraws the interface of the Compose Window a little, giving you options for recording and importing thelas trecording into a new message. iVoiceMail costs USD 29.95. Its competitors are VoiceMailClip and iSay.
 Letterbox is a plugin for Mail that reconfigures the interface by moving the Preview pane to the right. This gives Mail an "Outlook- or Entourage-like" appearance which many feel is a more efficient use of screen real estate, especially on Macs with wide-screen monitors. It is proving to be wildly popular. The developer promises more improvments in the future. Freeware.
 LinkABoo is a stand-along app that creates and manages hyperlinks to emails in Mail.app. It works with POP and IMAP messages and it only works with Tiger Mail, but with those restrictions it allows you to create links back to your emails in any other app that supports hyperlinks. Using it you can link to your emails in iCal, information managers like Yojimbo or SOHO Notes, GTD apps like Easy Task Manager or Actiontastic and more. Beta. Freeware.
 LocationSwitch is an automator action for people who work with one laptop in more than one place. In one hit it switches “network location, sound volume, SMTP servers, whether to fetch mail automatically, enabling/disabling of individual e-mail accounts, default printer selection” and more. It requires some customization for your individual needs, but full instructions are included in the archive.
 MailEnhancer is still a useful plug-in although some of its features have been incorporated into Mail 2.0. It makes Mail count all unread messages in its Dock icon, not just the ones in your inbox and it launches the Activity Viewer on a manual mail check. The developer's website seems to be down, but it can be downloaded from VersionTracker. (NB: When I tried to install it under Tiger it disabled all my other mailbundles. But after reinstalling them, all now seems to be well).
 Mailfollowup is a plugin that adds a “Followup” command to Apple Mail’s Message and Contextual Menus, so that the To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses appear in the reply exactly as they appeared in the original message. This allows you to add an afterthought or further reply to an email conversation in a more balanced and natural way. The plugin is freeware. The developer offers to provide email support (as he is able).
MailPod is an AppleScript that will move emails from a dedicated mailbox in Mail.app onto an iPod. When you run the script for the first time, it creates a “MailPod” mailbox in Apple Mail. Move any emails that you want to take with you into that folder, run the script again and it will move them into a “MailPod” folder under the iPod’s Extras menu. Ryos' script is a freeware alternative to shareware apps like iPDA and MailToPod (not for 10.4) which offer greater automation and features, but cost money.
 MacResponder enables Apple Mail to send auto-replies. It is fully customizable, works with multiple email accounts, and features rule-based settings to customize what is sent. It keeps track of the people it has replied to, ensuring that people only receive one reply. The demo version allows 24 hours of continuous use. The only drawback is that your computer has to be on all the time. I used this last Summer. My PC-using buddies, who said that Macs couldn't do this, had to eat their words. A full licence costs USD 19.95.
 Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do - moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.
 Mail Attachments Iconizer reverses Apple Mail's default behaviour of displaying attachments "in place" in emails. Complicated PDFs or PostScript files can take a long time to load that way. This plug-in ensures that attachments are always displayed as icons. You can continue to work with attachments as normal and can even force them to display in place by selecting “View in Place” from the attachments contextual menu, which appears when you right-click (or control click) on an attachment icon. It's shareware and costs USD 6 for a licence.
 Mail Pictures extends one of Apple Mail's nicest features, displaying a picture of the sender in the top right-hand corner of an email. Mail Pictures adds an “X-Image-Url:” header to your messages. This header points either to your .Mac image or contains an X-Face string generated by dairiki.org’s Online X-Face Converter. People can see you even if they don't have your picture in their Address Book. It’s a great idea, and helps to remember that emails come from real people. It is freeware.
 Mail Scripts bring powerful additional features to Apple Mail. These nine Apple Scripts (seven for Mail and two for Address Book) allow you to change the SMTP server for multiple accounts on the fly, archive messages more easily, add addresses to Address Book more efficiently, remove duplicate messages and perform other handy tricks like searching Address Book in a more clever way.
 MailSwitch offers users the ability to set up individual mail accounts (like “identities” in Outlook Express) in Apple Mail without going to the trouble of setting up separate OS X user accounts. It is designed for situations in which a number of people want to check mail on a single Mac. Each user account set up with MailSwitch has separate email stores and address books. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer password protection for the identities, so it is best used in situations of mutual trust.
 MailTags does for email management what Mail Act-on does for sorting. After you install it, a small tag appears in the top right-hand corner of your emails. Clicking on that opens a pane to the right of the message with a number of options (as you can see in the screenshot). You can specify due dates for any tasks the email might contain, give the email a priority level or add comments. You can also add it to a list of current projects that you can specify in Mail’s Preferences Pane.
 MailTemplate offers users the ability to use pre-made messages or templates to send similar messages to different people. It also features macro text tags that automate personalization, the ability to create templates with attachments, and the sharing of templates with teams using an Import/Export function. It is not a bulk mailing solution but helps cut down time responding to individuals who are asking the same question or have the same issue time and time again.
 MailTunes is a free-standing app that provides you with a dynamically changing signature for your emails. By default it contains info about the track currently playing in iTunes, but it can be configured to report uptime or anything else you know how to wring out of its shell script. It doesn't work in Tiger, although it will soon, but works well for Panther and Jaguar users.
 Mail Type Select adds Finder-like keyboard matching to Apple Mail’s message list window. That is to say, when installed, you can click in the message list window and starting typing. Mail will match on the first occurrence of what you type (you can jump to additional matches too). It’s quick. It’s freeware and the source code is also available. (I am told that it works well on Intel Macs as well).
 MailVoiceClip extends Mail's abilities by allowing you to record your voice and send it as a sound file (readable by Apples and PCs) in your emails. The developer claims that it will save you time, make your communication more personal and save typing strain on your fingers. You can also use it as a kind of dictaphone to record your thoughts and save them on your own computer for later use. Maybe it could tape a lecture as well. A full licence costs € 9.95 (Euros).
 MissingAttachments is a plugin that scans a Mail.app message and lets you know if you have referred to an attachment but forgotten to include it. It comes in the form of a classic plugin mailbundle which you can drop into the Bundle directory in your Mail folder after quitting Mail. The plugin only works with OS 10.4 and is freeware. A German version of the plugin has also been produced.
 MsgFiler quickly files messages based on the same principle as the QuickFile extension for Thunderbird and (for old-timers) the ’s’ keystroke in Pine and mutt. All you need to do is select the message to be filed. Press ⌘-9 or select “Move with MsgFiler” from the Message menu, and a dialog appears into which you start typing the name of the mailboxes while it matches what you type. You then select the mailbox from the list of matches and the email has gone to its rightful place. Shareware.
 NetShred is a stand-alone app that protects your privacy on the Internet by shredding the browsing histories and caches of your browsers and email clients. It supports all the main browsers and the following email clients - Mail.app 1 and 2, Eudora 5, Eudora 6, Mailsmith 2.x, Mozilla 1.x and Netscape 7.x. Options let you set the degree of automation that you want, what you would like the app to shred, what degree of shredding you require and how many write-overs you would like. Shareware (USD 19.95).
Next Unread Message AppleScript. Bruce Phillips and Qwerty Denzel have written an AppleScript that solves one of the most frequently emailed complaints about Mail.app that I receive—how to move by keyboard shortcut to the next unread message. Using this script combined with an app like FastScripts or a Quicksilver trigger, you can cycle through your unread messages in the Preview pane more efficiently. Freeware.
 Note to Self is “micro-app” that lets you quickly email a note, to-do or reminder to yourself in Mail.app. You can collect the notes or to-dos in a smart mailbox easily. A condition that matches “Yourself” as a recipient catches them all. This may appeal to people who are interested in using Mail.app as a personal information manager or as a “Yojimbo substitute” as well as those who like Will want more flexible and taggable to-dos. It will a feature in Leopard Mail, but it is here now for you to enjoy in this app. Freeware.
 OMiC: Plugin to extract winmail.dat files. Sooner or later, all Mail.app users who have any kind of email communication with Outlook users will get a message containing the dreaded unopenable winmail.dat file.
A utility called TNEF's Enough can extracts the file buried inside. It can really save your bacon.
Now a developer has wrapped the utility into a Mail.app bundle which automatically recognises incoming emails with winmail.dat attachments. Shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30).
 OneClick is an AppleScript that automates the process of establishing an internet connection, sending and checking for mail in Mail.app. It eliminates lots of button clicking and waiting, especially for dial-up users. It integrates with iCal to enable you to schedule when mail should be checked. Oneclick is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site.
 PocketLight is an OS 10.3 search app for Mail.app, iCal, Address Book and files in specified folders that was developed before Tiger was released. Spotlight overtakes it, but users still on Panther can enjoy its Spotlight-like abilities. The interface looks like Spotlight, offering matches for your search term in a separate “Spotlight pane” for Mail, iCal and Address Book. It contains French, Italian and German localisations.
 Portable Mail.app. Carlo Gandolfi has developed a way to run Mail and Address Book on a memstick or USB stick, iPod or external drive. It works as a shell script which opens the local copy of Mail using preferences stored in the external application bundle. The Portable Address Book works in the same way. If you have a USB stick big enough, you can also store your Mail folder, com.apple.mail.plist and caches on it.
RCMail is an AppleScript that, when attached to a rule in Apple Mail, sends commands written in an email to the shell for processing, logs the results and emails them back to you. For security reasons, the sender’s email address and a prefix for the message (a kind of password) have to be specified by you in the script. These must match before processing takes place. Likewise administrator-level commands are not supported.
Reply to return receipts with an AppleScript provided by Joel Nelson. It automatically replies to return receipts sent to you by people who use mail clients that support it (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc). You need to download the script, save it somewhere memorable. Then create a rule in Mail.app that will call the script. You will also need to add a “Disposition-Notification-To” header to the list of conditions in Mail.app’s rule menu. Instructions are provided in the link at the start of this entry.
Return Receipt AppleScript provides a solution to a much-requested "missing" feature in Mail.app -- requesting return receipts. It creates a new message, offering the option of which of your email accounts to use. It is easier to set up than Joel Nelson's script (see an earlier Hawk Wings post) although I have found it to be a little erratic.
 rooSwitch and rooSwitch Lite are two versions of an app that offer multiple profiles for most of Mac OS X’s iApps including Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail.app, Safari and Stickies. When it is installed, you can create, for example, separate "work" and "home" profiles to keep your account settings and other preferences location-specific. rooSwitch Lite is freeware and has limited functionality. The full version adds AppleScript and Automator support and more. It costs USD 14.95.
 Scale to Mail is an AppleScript droplet that will resize an image and dump it into an email which it opens for you in Apple Mail. Extract it to your desktop or place it in your Dock, drop the image on it, select the degree of reduction you want, and it goes to work, leaving you with a resized image in a fresh email. You can configure it to reduce by percentage or width, either chosen by you on the fly or pre-determined.
 SignatureProfiler. Scott Little has written a clever plugin that manages signatures in Mail.app and adds extra features like iTunes info and account-specific tail signatures. By adding placeholders like {itunes.display.info} to a signature in Mail’s signature preferences, you create a tagline that can be added to emails sent from any of your accounts which you specify. It also allows for the direct insertion of images and HTML into Mail's signature preference pane. Donation-ware.
Vacation Script is an AppleScript, which when attached to an Apple Mail rule, will auto-reply to your email and make sure that each email address is only replied to once. The developer believes that it will work in Panther as well as Tiger. It comes with simple instructions in the release notes for installation and set-up. It requires that your computer be on (obviously), and is freeware.
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Integration with other apps
anentry is an AppleScript that will send the currently selected headline in NetWewsWire to Apple Mail. All you need to do is download it and install it in NetNewsWire's scipts folders. Select the headline you want to email, run the script and it creates a new email in Mail.app containing the link. It’s a little bit unpolished, but it does the job. You can get it from the developer’s web site. (No longer strictly needed. NetNewsWire 2.1+ has this feature built-in.)
 Apple Mail Conduit is designed for synching and transferring emails between Apple Mail 2.0 and Palm Desktop. It supports Mail 2.0 and the Palm mail programs Mail, Mark/Space Mail and VersaMail. Its interface offers a sophisiticated degree of configurability and flexiblity, allowing you synchronize, transfer from Mac to PDA or PDA to Mac. The conduit is freeware although donations are not refused.
 Chatalog is a plug-in for Mail that stores and indexes iChat logs within Mail, so that you can search them together with your emails. It offers some definite advantages over trying to find your chat logs with Spotlight. First, Chatalog finds only chats, not everything else Spotlight finds under "Other" and secondly, it indexes links and images you have sent and received separately.
 Daylite Mail Integration is a plug-in which integrates Apple Mail with Marketcircle's Daylite, a contact, calendar and project management app. A recent update (8 October 2005) offers new features including better compatibility with Tiger, better handling of groups and addresses and a number of bug fixes. You can read more about its features and operation on the Marketcircle website.
 FeedMailer is an AppleScript for NetNewsWire, that offers an easy way to mail news feeds and articles. Drop it into your ~/Library/Scripts folder and then highlight a feed or article in NetNewsWire. Select the FeedMailer script from the Script menu in the menubar, and a new email will appear in Apple Mail, containing either the feed, a link to the article or both (your choice).
iCalMail is an AppleScript app that creates an event in iCal which will email people nominated as “attendees” at a pre-determined time. The subject of the email is the event’s name and the text of the email can be set by entering text in the Notes field of the event. A file whose path is entered into the Location field will be sent as an attachment. A separate setup script creates a calendar for the mail events and an example event. The script is donation-ware.
 Mail to Filemaker Importer is an AppleScript-based app that will import emails from Apple Mail into a FileMaker Pro database. The importer allows you to customize the fields and database into which the emails will be imported and to choose whether to import whole mailboxes or selected, individual messages. A demo is available from the developer’s website. The full version costs USD 15.
Mail2iCal1.3 is an AppleScript that will allow you to export an email into iCal as an event. It can be called from the AppleScript menu or triggered via a rule in Apple Mail. 10.4's Apple Mail differs significantly from previous versions, so some features of the script require workarounds. It is freeware. I don't use it myself, but it enjoys 4.9 stars on Version Tracker.
 Mail To Yojimbo AppleScript imports the currently selectedMail.app message into Yojimbo as a text note. This is handy (a) if you use Yojimbo and (b) like me, you find it a bit of a pain to import emails with the “Save PDF to Yojimbo” option in the PDF section of the Print dialog. The script will import the contents of the email and the sender, subject and date. Hook it up to a Quicksilver trigger or FastScripts shortcut, and you're away.
Mail Yourself iCal ToDos is an AppleScript that will add To Dos to iCal via a Mail.app message. Simply compile and save the script on his site. Attach it to an Apple Mail rule set to match. Email yourself the task to be added, and Mail.app will run the script, using the subject of the message as the title of the To Do and dumping the body of the email into the Notes.
 SerialMail is a plug-in that generates bulk mail-outs from a template using data provided by an Address Book group. It is not as polished as some dedicated bulk-mailers, but may suit those users who don’t need the power features of those apps. You need to write the template yourself using pre-defined fields. It’s not difficult. Full instructions are available. The plug-in is donation-ware.
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Spam Tools
Apple Mail's spam filter is pretty good (see the links on how it works in the Hawk Wings blog). But for those who feel the need for more ammunition in the Spam War, these are useful add-ons.
 JunkMatcher is a free, open source spam filter that can work insead of Mail's inbuilt spam matching or with it for added protection. It runs two types of tests, property tests using Bayesian filtering and pattern tests to spot keywords such as “v1ägra” or “\/Iagr á”. Highly customisable and offering rich analytical tools, it looks to be be the additional spam filter of choice.
 Personal Antispam is marketed as "the ultimate tool to fight spam for Mac OS X", which "outperforms any spam filter available". It had better; it costs USD 49.95 for a single-user licence. For that kind of money you also get nice graphs analysing your email traffic and spam load. I have never used it myself.
 Spamfire is an anti-spam app that stands as a proxy between your server and Apple Mail, filtering your email and offering additional protection from spam for IMAP and POP accounts. It uses Bayesian filters which detect spam on a word-for-word frequency basis. This can complement Apple Mail’s inbuilt spam filter which uses a slightly different approach, known as “Latent Semantic Analysis”. A licence costs USD 39.95.
 SpamSieve claims to offer better spam protection than Mail's in-built filter. Using Bayesian spam filtering, it integrates with Apple Mail and offers more control and information on the spam you receive. It logs each spam message, letting you see how the spam was caught. It says that it can outsmart spammers' work-arounds and encodings. It allows you to turn off Mail's in-built polling feature and will notify you only when you receive an email that is not spam. Many Mail users provide their testimonials on the SpamSieve website. It costs USD 30.
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Interface Tweaks (Lozenges be gone!)
 Alternative Apple Mail Icons - I've collected together as many different Apple Mail stamp icons as I could find. At the moment that's 139 of them. Berkeley shiksa feministas, red-neck patriots and everyone inbetween wil find something to suit. There are also instructions on how to replace the red-tailed hawk stamp icon with one of the new icons and how to replace the standard red "new mail badges".
 Debuttonizer removes the new buttons from Apple Mail in Tiger. It is a simple utility that allows the user to disable (and re-enable) these toolbar buttons. The interface consists of a single window with a single button. Uninstalling the "new" old look is also simple. There is only one drawback - the toolbar buttons won't highlight when you click on them anymore. It is freeware.
 CageFighter is another app for those who can't stand Mail.app's new look. "This app is simple and sweet," the developer says. Like Debuttonizer and Mail Stamps, it removes the new Tiger Mail lozenges and provides the option to return to a Panther-like titlebar, and the option to use Panther Icons. It is easy to use and it is freeware. The source code is also available on the developer's website.
 Mail Stamps will replace the lozenge-shaped buttons in Tiger's Apple Mail with the icons from Panther. When Tiger was released, Mail’s new interface was a shock to many people. Recently updated, Mail Stamps now features a pain-free installer that will make all the changes for you. If you are not technically-minded (I'm not) that's no small thing. It's my interface tweaker of choice.
 Mail Fixer is a stand-alone app that allows you to "skin" Apple Mail by replacing the default icons and button shapes. It offers more adventurous changes than the "Panther-izing" apps above". One theme is included with the app, which replaces Tiger’s buttons with icons and buttons to match Safari, and basic instructions are included on how to roll your own themes. It is freeware.
 UNO is a hack that can bring Mail 2.0's unified Toolbar/Titlebar and lighter metal look to all the windows in your system. UNO’s aim is “to enhance aqua interface consistency, by making all elements look and feel as one.” It does a surprisingly good job of blending Apple's native apps with the apps of third-party developers. You can see more screenshots and download the hack from UNO's website
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Archiving
 BackityMac is a backup utility that simplifies the process by offeriing "pre-sets" for Mail.app data, iCal, Address Book and more which it saves into a fresh disk image. In the event of a disaster, it also offers the option of restoring your data from one of these disk images, again a process of a few mouse clicks.
As a bonus, a second pane lists some maintenance tasks (and helpful notes on what each one is) that BackityMac can perform. BackityMac is donation-ware.
 Eaglefiler is an personal information manager like Yojimbo or SOHO Notes. Unlike them, it lets you select a mailbox in Mail and then press an F-key to archive it. The messages are then stored in mbox format and are available for searching, tagging, etc. If the messages are already tagged with MailTags, EagleFiler preserves those tags. Shareware (USD 40).
 Email Backup Pro offers a simple schedule for the complete backup of messages and settings in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora and MS Entourage X and 2004. The shareware version adds a restore option and comes with an add-on to manage external backups. Restoring the backup is easy. Email Backup Pro is shareware (USD 9.95) and makes backing up so simple that there's no excuse.
 FastMailBase, formerly MailBase, is another archive and search application for your emails. It claims to offer searching, scheduled or on demand importing of the selected emails including attachments, sorting by field, filtering, integration with Address Book, direct individual and group replies to archived emails, exporting and printing. The full version costs USD 97 which seems expensive to me.
 Mail Archiver X is a dedicated Mail backup app. Mail Archiver X works with Mail.app, PowerMail, Eudora, Mozilla, Netscape, Thunderbird, the standard mbox format and Entourage. It backs up your mail, and also cleans it for archiving. It can strip out HTML and other useless things, so that you only save the important parts of your correspondence. It also offers a browser to search and manipulate your mail archives.
It costs USD 34.95.
 MailSteward will archive your Apple Mail email in a relational database so that it can be searched with more options and power than Spotlight can provide on its own. The stand-alone app copies your email into a SQLite database where you can easily and effectively find particular emails, by sender and recipient and date range and keywords. You can even “roll your own” SQL query. You can also sort the selected emails, print them, and save them to text files. It costs USD 29.95.
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Leopard Mail Stationery Templates
 The Novcom.net Design Group has created a collection of sixteen HTML templates for Leopard Mail, featuring and "Liquid Ice", "Fire", Onyx, Emerald, Ruby and more. The site also contains information on how to install the templates which are free and provided without guarrantee. Dave of Novcom emails to say "we hope to have a ton more" soon.
Equinux Stationery Pack is a collection of 111 HTML stationery templates for Leopard Mail. The templates comes with a (fairly basic) dedicated browser app which displays them sorted by keyword and allows you to search for particular themes. It covers a vast range of subjects and styles range from quite tasteful to unusable (IMHO). The pack is shareware (€24.95 = USD 38.50 = AUD 41).
Jumsoft has released a pack of 50 additional HTML stationery templates for Leopard Mail. The pack contains 50 "high-quality and exclusive design options for every occasion", covering Family, Congratulations, Invitations, Emotions, Vacations and Seasons themes. An additional group are described as "Neutral", or multi-purpose. Shareware -- USD 39.
Christmas Stationery is suitably Christmas-like. It comes placeholders for three images and lots of snow flakes scattered around the bottom of the text area. Of all the templates that I have seen this is the most tasteful. Same it has such restricted use! It was developed by the German blogger at tice.de, and is available from his web site in English and German versions. Freeware.
Photo Cluster. Someone at the University of Chicago has whipped up a Leopard Mail Stationery template as an exercise in testing the drag-n-drop images wells in the default stationery templates. It’s nothing revolutionary, but offers a more image rich environment than the standard templates provide. It's a lot of fun to play with but not very good as an email gift for friends on dial-up. Freeware.
Templates for business Technosanity blogger Jeff Turner thinks that the Leopard Mail templates are great. But they’re just too “cute” for most business use. In an attempt to quickly create Mac OS X Leopard Mail templates that are more appropriate for business use, I offer up two more “not cute” versions, customizable with your own logo. Freeware
Baby Girl Announcement Template. Those expecting a baby girl and distressed by the lack of a pink Baby Announcement template in Leopard Mail will find relief in the work of Ed Dyer, who has tweaked the existing blue one to offer a pink alternative. He writes about it on the Apple Discussions and has made the template available for download from his iDisk .
Six New Year Templates A French blogger has whipped up six templates with a New Year's theme and images from Paris, Amsterdam, Canada, Montreal, New York City as well as a generic one. They are freeware. The link of digg says that the templates have "No Ugliness as on Apple own's!" Freeware.
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Switching
 ABFiller is a freeware utility that vastly simplifies the process of importing contacts from an Outlook PST file. The whole exercise can be reduced to six mouse clicks:
Open the app.
Select File > Open.
Navigate to your PST file.
Select it and click Open.
Click OK in the next dialog to being importing.
Click OK when the process is finished. All done. And it's freeware!
 Dbx Converter is a open source Win32 application that can convert Outlook Express's *.dbx folders into the standard mbox format that Apple Mail can understand. PC Users will find this an excellent way to get their emails into Apple Mail. Outlook users can important emails from their *.pst files into Outlook Express first and then convert them with this application. It's free.
 Eudora Mailbox Cleaner translates Eudora’s non-standard mailboxes into formats that can easily be imported into Apple Mail and other mail clients without loss of data or scrambling. It allows you to bring your mailboxes, nicknames and filters over to Apple Mail from both the PC and Mac versions of Eudora. The process is as simple as dragging your “Eudora folder” onto Eudora Mailbox Cleaner’s icon in Finder.
Mailsmith to Mail.app export Script. David Hamilton has written a script that exports emails in a smarter way than the default that comes with Mailsmith itself. He has tweaked it so that it will preserve your folder hierarchy in Mailsmith which the default script flattens. Of course, “no guarantees, representations, or warrantees by the author or anyone else”.
 Outlook2Mac is a program which painlessly converts your contacts, emails and calendar appointments into a format that Macs can understand. It is compatible with Microsoft® Outlook 97, 98, 2000, 2002, and 2003 on most versions of Windows, and supports the industry-standard .mbox, vCard, and iCal file formats. It costs USD 10.0 and works with the Other Mail Client too.
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Address Book
 Address Book Dates is a plugin for Address Book that adds information about a contact’s star sign and age to Address Book’s birthday field. It also offers quick iCal link to other dates like anniversaries. Clicking on a contact’s birthday label brings up a contextual menu containing the information. No more guessing how old your partner is! Address Book Dates is freeware and is a universal binary.
 AddressBookQuickEntry is a stand-alone app that offers a streamlined and easier-to-use interface for entering contacts into Address Book. The developer created it after finding that “Address Book’s interface for creating and entering new information is clunky, accident-prone, and very non-Apple.” ABQE's interface offers a clean and functional alternative. ABQE is freeware.
 Address Book Importer will do what it says; it imports contacts in CSV or tab delimited format into Address Book. Address Book has its own import facility, of course, but Address Book Importer offers greater control and flexibility over the data to be imported, allowing customized mapping to Address Book’s fields. It is free for a "one-off" use but the developer asks a USD 10 donation for continual use.
 Address Book Reports provides flexible and useful print-outs of the contact information in your Address Book. It offers significant improvements on Address Book’s built-in printing. Its Card and Phonebook styles are ideal for slipping into a Day planner, Filofax or diary. Address Book Reports also allows for custom page sizes for the reports, so hipster-wielding retro-tech GTD fans are catered for as well. 3″ x 5″ print outs are just a few clicks away. Address Book Reports is shareware (USD 15)
 Addressbook2pine is a freeware app that converts Address Book contacts into the tab delimited .addressbook format used by pine. It can also convert the other way, importing contacts from pine’s addressbook into OS X’s Address Book. You can customize the way nicknames are handled or how email IDs are applied. The app is freeware although the author accepts donations.
 Address Book to CSV Exporter will export all your Address Book contacts into a CSV file ready for exporting into another email client or webmail service. As you can see from the icon, he is thinking mainly of GMail, but a number of webmail services can import contacts in CSV format. The app presents you with a simple interface. All you need to do is select the location for the finished export and click “Export to CSV”. Freeware.
Address Book and Google Calendar. Mark Scrimshire has written two plugins for Address Book that automatically add information about a particular contact into a Google Calendar event. then Control-click on the phone or address tab or the contact you want to schedule a meeting with or call. It adds an option to the Contextual menu in Address Book. Select the “Create Call on Google for…” or “Create Google Meeting for… at…” option and the plugin fills in the contact details for you. Freeware.
 Address-O-Matic is a utility that allows you to share Address Books on Macs connected to the same local area network. It makes use of Mac OS X’s Bonjour service to publish contacts from one Mac designated as the server and to allow client Macs to subscribe to those contacts. You can determine which contacts or groups to share over the network. Address-O-Matic is shareware (USD 20).
 Address-o-sync allows you to share and sync contacts from your Address Book with other users over a Rendezvous network. Set-up is über-easy. If you are using Mac OS 10.3 or better, the Macs will simply find each other. You can choose to share only certain groups, which means work-related contacts can be shared, but private contacts kept private. You can also password-protect the sharing, restricting who on the network can — and who can’t — get access.
 AddressX makes all the contacts in an Exchange Global Address List available in your Address Book, provided you have Exchange server 2000 or 2003 with WebDAV enabled. The contact information which the app pipes into Address Book can be filtered, set to auto-update and synced to an iPod or palm device with iSync. Contacts are placed an Exchange contacts group in Address Book making them easy to identify and manage. Shareware.
 Adium Book is a stand-alone app that syncs information between your Adium contacts and Address Book. Amongst other things, it can copy the contact’s picture and IM login from Adium to Address Book. This allows you to search your Adium and Address Book contacts in a single interface and to add new contacts to Address Book using the information stored in Adium. It can also give you reports of all your Address Book contacts with AIM, MSN, Jabber or ICQ accounts.
 AusAB is a set of four plugins that offers Whereis maps of your contacts, public transport times to locations in Sydney, the option of setting a primary address for a contact and directions from one of the addresses on your own card to a selected address of another contact. Like the StreetMaps plugin for the UK and the Google Maps plugin, the new options are available in a drop down menu when you click on a contact’s address tab.
 BuddyPop is a small and unobtrusive app that provides quick access to your Address Book contacts in a pop-up which is activated by a user-defined keyboard shortcut. Hitting the shortcut brings up a simple search dialog. Type until you get the matches you are looking for, then BuddyPop extracts the information from your Address Book and displays it in an attractive pop-up. Includes Skype, X-Lite SIP SoftPhone and Vonage support. Shareware.
 EntourageABMenu is a Menubar utility for Entourage that gives you easy access to your contacts system-wide, the same thing as iAddressX does for Address Book and Mail.app. It is also useful for Mail.app users who are connected to Exchange servers, where it can --- with Entourage as the middle-man ---- make Exchange's address book accessible to Mail.app.
 Export Address Book is an app which exports all the data in your Address Book into an independent data file that you can archive or import elsewhere or use for merges with apps like Word and FileMaker. It allows you to select which contacts to export, which fields from those contacts and how to order them, settings which can be saved as a template for repeated use. Shareware.
 Google Maps Plug-in for Address Book allows you to call up a map for any address in your Address Book or to ask for directions on how to get there. It currently only supports addresses in the UK, the USA, Canada and Japan. After installation the options are available in the Contextual Menu when you click on any Address Book address tab. The plug-in is donation-ware.
GoogleFill is an Address Book plug-in that performs a reverse look-up via Google for addresses that match the telephone numbers in your Address Book. If it finds it, it presents you with the details of the address in a dialog box, and gives you the option to add that information to your contact’s card. This will only work with US telephone numbers because Google is not able to reverse look-up addresses anywhere else. GoogleFill is freeware.
 iAddressX is a menubar for your Address Book contacts. It installs itself as a preference pane in System Preferences. An “@” icon then appears in your menubar with a drop down menu that will list all your contacts by a variety of categories. The preference pane allows you to set which fields the menu should display, to assign a hotkey for opening the drop down menu, to control the way numbers are dialled (Vonage is also supported) and more. Shareware (USD 8).
 JABMenu adds an icon to your Menubar which contains a drop-down menu with all your Address Book contacts arranged alphabetically, by groups and by companies. It also maintains a “Recent Used” list. A hotkey opens a quick search dialog for quickly locating the contact you want. iAddressX does exactly the same thing, although it lacks the quick search option and the integration with Jon’s Phone Tools.
 SBook5 is a smarter alternative to Mac OS X's native Address Book. Developed by Simson Garfinkel of MIT, it is faster, more flexible and smarter than Address Book. The free-form database that powers it allows for any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs and URLs per card which it then parses and sorts. It allows for the importing of Address Book contacts and cards that it creates can also be "pushed back" into Address Book. As far as I can see it is freeware.
"Show Emails from..." Script. A clever little Address Book plugin that quickly finds and lists in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular email address. After installing it with the instructions on his site, clicking and holding the cursor over an email label in Address Book gives you a “Show Emails from” option. Click it, and — voila! — the plugin opens an Address search in Mail.app for that email address. Freeware.
 Snail Mail is a stand-alone app that addresses and prints envelopes based on the information in your Address Book. It can print single envelopes or an envelope for every member of an Address Book Group. You also select multiple cards for printing on the fly. It can also print USPS or Australia Post barcodes on its envelopes. It is easy to see why Macworld gave the app a four mouse rating.
The Streetmap (UK) plug-in displays the location map of a Contact using the maps at www.streetmap.co.uk.
The developer suggests that these maps are larger, clearer and often more accurate and up-to-date for the UK than the MapQuest versions used by Apple’s ‘Map of’ option or the Google Map versions used by Brian Toth’s Google Maps plug-in. You can download the plug-in, which is free and works in Panther and Tiger, from versiontracker.
 Tapdex is a preference pane that enables you to access your Address Book contacts with a user-defined hot key. Hit your hot key and Tapdex’s search window pops up. Type in the name and the search results narrow in real time until you are presented with the contact you are looking for. Tapdex is a bit like a “Lite” implementation of BuddyPop. It does not have the rich feature list of BuddyPop (support for Skype, X-Lite and Vonage, Bluetooth SMS, etc) but it is free.
 Whereabouts is an app that allows you to share your Address Book contacts over the Internet. You can publish the contacts you want to share and choose to host them either in the Sites folder of a .Mac account or via FTP on your web server. You can also subscribe to the published cards of others. Whereabouts is freeware.
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iCal
AppleScripts for iCal Events and To Dos. These two AppleScripts were originally posted in the Quicksilver forums. They were designed to be run from a Quicksilver trigger, although they don't have to be. You could launch them with FastScripts or something else. Dan Dickinson has written a good tutorial on setting up a Quicksulver trigger, as has Coelomic.
AppleScript to backup up iCal and Address Book data. Creates backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host. The developer wrote this script after an unfortunate incident involving a mobile phone. He is also offering to answer any queries people might have with using it.
 CalTalk is a helpful app that enables the sharing of iCal calendars over a local network using the Bonjour protocol built into Mac OS X 10. You can share iPhoto and iTunes like this out of the box. CalTalk lets you add iCal to the list, just as Address-O-Matic adds the same option for Address Book. It allows you to specify which calendars to share with which users, which port to use and what level of security you want. Donation-ware.
 Dates to iCal is an app that syncs birthdays and anniversaries in your Address Book to iCal, adding them as alarmed events to a separate calendar. You can also add other customized Address Book date items to iCal and even add birthdays for people for whom you don’t have a separate Address Book card. You can set the kind of alarm that iCal will provide (email works best for me) and choose the advanced notice you need. Donationware.
 DoBeDo is a widget that manages your iCal ToDos. It will list your ToDos, but also allows you mark them as completed, to edit them and to select which ones to display. The latest version has a snazzy skin to match the new 10.4.4 Calendar widget. The reverse side offers a number of options for displaying the information, including the length of display time after a ToDo is completed and the option of a variety of skins. DoBeDo is freeware.
Event Maker is an app that creates an iCal event or to do from a selected email in Mail.app. Select an email in Mail and run the application from the Script menu or the Dock. The subject and contents of the message are copied over into the Title and Notes fields, but the rest you need to fill in yourself. The developer points out that this is “an early release that is missing many features”. He is looking for some user feedback and for an icon for the app.
 High Priority is a System Preferences Add-on that allows you to create, edit and delete iCal ToDos directly from the menubar without the need to have iCal open. Command-Clicking on a ToDo in the menubar display opens a dialog for editing every field of the ToDo including the notes, or marking it as completed. You can use it as freeware, but the unregistered version is unable to create new ToDos. High Priority is shareware (USD 6).
 iCal-alarmist is an app that sets additional alarms in iCal. The free version sets a pop-up alarm for every event in a chosen calendar fixed at 12 hours before the event. These alarms are created in addition to your existing alarms, not in place of them. A small payment (€ 3,47 = USD 4.11) unlocks the ability to set alarms for all events in a calendar with one click, to set sounds, email or popup alarms or any combination for a given calendar, and to delete alarms.
 iCalMaker is a text-based app that allows you to import, export, modify, convert, print out, translate or email (with Apple Mail) your iCal appointments. It costs money (USD 34.95) but it might be worth it if you manage a lot of appointments, spend a lot of time shunting appointments around in iCal or want to sync your appointments with PalmDesktop. It supports Apple Mail (and some other email clients as well).
 iCalFix is a plug-in for iCal that adds an alarm automatically, set to remind you 24 hours before the event. It requires SIMBL, (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet and iAlert, a Mail.app (and more) notification system. The developer seems to plan more features in the future, but you can get the current version from his blog.
 iCalViewer is a very creative and interesting add-on for iCal that displays your iCal information in a window or on your desktop. Starting from "now" on the left, it "streams" upcoming events and ToDos, giving you a more flexible sense of what's coming up than iCal's default views allow. The preference pane allows you to set the time period it should display, which calendars to include, whether to display it over the top of your screen saver or not and various options for displaying the ToDos and the events. It's shareware (USD 11).
 MenuCalendarClock is another menubar app for iCal that gives you access to your iCal events and ToDos from the menubar. Clicking its menubar icon drops down a display containing a calendar view of the current month, the events for the day and a list of your ToDos. Its preferences allow you to control a configurable menubar clock replacement and to set the colour of the window. Further options determine how the events and ToDos are displayed. Shareware (USD 18.95).
 NumSemaine is a little app which adds the week of the year to “All Day Event” Section of your iCal window.
It can also generate an ics file containing all the weeks of the year and their date ranges.
It is freeware and available from the developer’s web site.
 Zoodo is a small app that allows you to create ToDos without touching the mouse once.
After installing the app, launch it using Quicksilver (or LaunchBar or Butler or other launcher of choice). It presents you with a dialog that you can navigate by typing and tabbing. Mouseless To Do creation. Nice! ZooDo is freeware (donations not refused).
Remove Duplicate Events is an AppleScript that (not surprisingly) removes duplicate events from iCal calendars.
This is particularly useful for people who sync their calendars with Palm devices, a process that often causes duplicates. Or if you have a wife or partner who can't help adding events more than once.
Miscellaneous
 AOL Service Assistant is a utility that allows you to use Apple’s Mail.app, Address Book, iChat and Safari with an AOL account, instead of relying on AOL’s own software. If you have used AOL’s software for email, the Service Assistant lets you import those messages into Apple Mail from your Personal Filing Cabinet. You can then use Apple Mail to send and receive your AOL emails.
 CopyPaste is a utility that bundles together the auto-expanding text snippet features of Textpander and the multiple clipboard functions of iClip. Like iClip or iSnip, it offers multiple clipboards and adds access through the contextual menu to make insertion even easier. It can also automatically record the history of the things that you have copied. Like Textpander, this app offers predefined keyboard shortcuts for inserting blocks of frequently used text. MacAddict Magazine describes it as “the turbo clipboard utility on steriods”. CopyPaste is shareware (USD 30).
 CuteClips is an expanded clipboard utility. It can store up to twelve recently copied elements — images, URLs, text or files — in a nice smoked glass dialog, complete with preview. Hitting a hotkey (Shift-Command-V by default) brings up the utility’s dialog. You can also create “sticky” clips, by holding down the Option key while clicking on a current entry. A demo limited to three slots and with no access to the utility’s preferences is available from the developer’s web site. The full version costs 5 euros (c. USD 6).
 Emailchemy is a stand-alone app that converts mailboxes and emails from a large number of forgotten or unusual mail clients into formats that Apple Mail and other current mail clients can understand. It can also clean, repair and condense mailboxes and prepare them for archiving or entry into a stand-alone database. It costs USD 25 for a single user
 Fastscripts is an AppleScript management utility that offers several nifty improvements over the way OS X manages AppleScripts. It’s a very useful add-on for working within Apple Mail and for working with Mail in other apps. It installs itself as an additional icon in the Menubar, and allows you to allocate keyboard shortcuts to each script in your collection, as well offering other scripting benefits. The developer has also released a freeware version of FastScripts called "FastScripts Lite".
 Gmail Counter is a Dashboard widget that keeps track of the amount of used space in your Gmail account. This is particularly useful if you use Mail.app to read and manage your Gmail. You may not often visit the web interface and see the message about used space. A full account could creep up on you. The widget is freeware.
Gmailto No. 2 is a little app that allows you to set Gmail as your default email client in Mail.app, so that any email link you click opens a new email in Gmail’s web-based interface. Two Gmail notification utilities — GmailStatus and GmailNotifier — allow you to do the same thing, as well as poll your Gmail account for new mesasges, but if you don’t want to use either of them, this little app will get the job done.
 Hallon is an open source utility that extends the idea of bookmarks from web browsers to apps like Apple Mail, Address Book and iTunes. It adds a raspberry icon to your Statusbar, which controls a drop-down menu storing all the bookmarks you create. Bookmarks can be edited and notes or alarms added to them. It currently supports Apple Mail, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Terminal, Finder and Safari. More plugins for other apps are promised in the near future. Check out its Sourceforge page.
Hidden Mail Script. In Panther you could start Mail in a hidden state. In Tiger this is broken, but this script restores the option. To install it, download the Hidden Mail script and move it to your Applications folder. Go to System Preferences > Accounts > Your Account > Login Items. Remove Mail if it is there and add HiddenMail. Now when you login, Mail will start hidden.
 Ipanema is a stand-alone app that uses Apple Mail to email your computer's IP address to you at fixed intervals or only when it changes, as you determine. The software will check the built-in Ethernet, 3rd party Ethernet, Airport, IP over FireWire and PPP ports for IP addresses. Ipanema also can report your “real” IP address if you are behind a firewall. it costs USD 4.95
 iPDA allows you to transfer your PIM data to your iPod so it’s available to read whenever you need it. It supports the transfer of information from Entourage and Stickies, as well as Mail, Address Book and iCal. You can automate the syncing of your information by choosing to sync on launch and automatically exit afterwards and/or sync the information manually.
All versions of the iPod and iPod mini software are supported. MailToPod and Pod2Go do the same things, so explore them all before you buy. iPod It is shareware (USD 14.95).
 JPEGCleaner will reduce the size of jpeg (and jfif) files by removing resource forks and metadata. This results in a smaller file, which loads faster, and uses less bandwidth when sending by e-mail. JFIF files are converted to JPEG. The app provides options to adjust the quality and size of the image. You can also choose to create a new message with the optimised file in Mail.app. JPEGCleaner is shareware (USD 14.95).
 Jumpcut is a nifty little menubar utility that keeps a history of your clipboard. Its Preferences allow you to specify how many past clippings it should remember and display, how often it should save the list and the keyboard hotkey. Although you can access the clips from the menubar, pressing the hotkey brings up a bezel display. You can cycle through the clips using the hotkeys and then drop in the one you want. It can save you a lot of time in Mail.app and elsewhere. All that’s missing is the option to make the selections “sticky”. Jumpcut is open-source and a universal binary.
 MailToPod is a utility that transfers emails from Apple Mail to your iPod or iPod mini. It works with POP and IMAP accounts but not with Exchange accounts. The app allows you to nominate which mailboxes to sync to your iPod and how many messages. The emails are saved on the iPod as text note files, which you can find in the Extras menu. (Doesn't work with Tiger, but will soon).
 MySync is an app that provides all the benefits of .Mac synchronisation without the need to have a .Mac account. It allows you to sync your Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes between Macs connected on a single local area network. It uses the Apple Sync engine built-in to Tiger (so requires 10.4+) and configures one computer as the master and the rest as slaves. MySync is currently in public beta, offering time-limited licences for the beta trial.
 Onlife maintains a record of your information usage and data history by tracking your activity in a variety of mainly online applications, recording what you read or looked at, how long for and keeping a snapshot of the web page or email or document.You can view your activity by day, week or month in a graphical form or view your online history in table form
 Pod2Go will transfer your emails out of Apple Mail onto any iPod (except the Shuffle), along with news feeds, movie schedules, weather reports, stock prices, lyrics, gas prices, street directions and a lot of other things. Pod2Go costs USD 12. Emails are saved as Notes under the Extras menu. Pod2Go provides a bespoke Notes Reader for accessing your emails and other text notes. (Works with 10.4).
 Postfix Enabler is a stand-alone app that allows you to provide your own SMTP, IMAP and POP3 services with or without SSL support. It promises “a totally-functional buzzword-compliant mail server in less than a minute, the Mac Way”. The latest version is compatible with Tiger’s new way of launching services. It comes with lengthy instructions for configuring Apple Mail and it costs USD 9.99.
 Service Scrubber is a utility created by Peter Maurer (maker of Textpander, Witch and other productivity gems) that helps you manage your Services menu. With Service Scrubber you can delete the services of old deleted apps and functions that you will never use. You can restructure the menu, change the keyboard shortcuts for each service and even disable unwanted ones. Service Scrubber is donation-ware.
 Spell Catcher X is an all-in-one auto-correcter, spell checker and snippet manager. It can catch DOuble CApitals, extra spaces, accidental doubble keystrokes and more, correct mistakes ‘on the fly’ or auto-suggest corrections if it can’t work out what you were trying to type. Spell Catcher X feels streets ahead of CopyPaste, both in terms of integration into OS X and its feature set.
 TextExpander is a third-party Preference Pane that stores snippets of texts and graphics, and user-defined short cuts for them. This allows you to save enormous amounts of time by storing often-repeated text samples and then inserting them in your emails (or other documents and files) with a few key strokes. It works in other apps apart from Apple Mail and is shareware (USD 29.95). You can get it from the developer's web site.
 Textsoap provides a graphical interface (as well as Services) for over 70 different ways of treating text, whether in Mail.app, a word processor or a text editor, allowing easy access to other functions, like setting the quote level of text quickly, adding initial capitals, changing between upper and lower case and much much more.
It comes with plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit, Eudora and MailSmith and works natively with Cocoa-based apps like Apple Mail and Pages.
 TNEF’s Enough is a utility that decodes attachments from Outlook users that arrive unreadably jumbled and named "winmail.dat". Simply save the winmail.dat file to the Desktop, launch TNEF’s Enough and open the winmail.dat file from the utility’s File menu.
TNEF’s Enough works its magic, and you get a readable attachment. TNEF’s Enough is freeware.
 ToDo X is a app dedicated solely to managing To Do lists. It is, in fact, the fully-tooled-up Rolls Royce of To Do lists, with dedicated features that leave iCal in the shade. Importing To Dos from iCal calendars is easy. The Preferences allow you to specify the colour-coding for up to nine levels of priority and several other options, like spell-checking as you type and how many To Dos to display. You can access the list either from the Menubar or from the Dock. Shareware (USD 15).
 WYWO (While You Were Out) is a stand-alone app that sends telephone messages as emails. No more little slips of paper. Using this brings telephone messages into Mail.app’s Inbox with all your other emails. (Not least, very excellent from a GTD “sorting stuff” perspective). WYWO offers you a dialog screen with all the expected telephone message options.It is fully integrated with Address Book so picking the recipient’s email address is easy and the recipient gets a nice email in their inbox.
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