There are a few plugins and hacks that I think are essential for Apple’s Mail.app to work properly.

• perfect new mail notification: Mail.appetizer
• pretty UI: mailstamps
• mail organising tools: MailActOn and MailTags
• Speech and tardis sounds when new mail arrives

There is an underwhelming choice of email clients for mac os x. Mail, Mailsmith, GyazMail and Thunderbird are ones that spring to mind and good reviews of their comparative merits exist. My belief is that the desire of developers to make a new email client is low because Mail.app is actually quite a good product and difficult to compete with- good but not great- it can do with a few improvements…

Mail.app new mail notification

I like to know when I have new email but not be distracted switching to my mail program every five minutes. In Mail.app’s out-of-the-box form doesn’t give you a lot of choices for notification - a changed icon indicating how many emails has arrived is of little use- you still need to check if they are important. Sure, you could set up rules and make it make different beeps when email from people in your addressbook arrived but even then you have to switch to Mail.app and open the message… too much work! too much of a distraction!

Mail.appetizer is simple and effective software that displays incoming emails in transparent notification box. You can read the message (how much is displayed depends on how much screen real estate you give it) and then open the message, mark it as read, delete it or look at it later. The dialog that pops up is customisable and lets you make the notification as unobtrusive or as obvious as you like. Mail.appetizer is currently at version 1.2 Beta 4, is a small (294k), easy to install download, and is definitely worth a look.

User interface improvements for Mail.app

Mail.app 2.0 is great but it fixed a few things in the UI that didn’t really need fixing- the buttons are now just grey-shadows of their former selves (mouse over the picture to see the comparison). The creator of mailstamps and John Siracusa obviously thought so too.

I don’t know about you, but I like the Panther look a heck of a lot better. The first time I saw the new Mail toolbar, I filed a bug on it. (Radar 3968093: “Toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0 are hideously ugly.”) It was immediately closed as a duplicate, so at least one other person agrees with me…
The whole Mail application looks like it got beaten with the ugly stick in Tiger…
Aesthetics are admittedly subjective, and I can imagine someone liking the new look. But the toolbar buttons suffer from some usability problems as well. First there’s the issue of the little (pale blue, of course) “capsules” that surround each button. The capsules make all the toolbar buttons the same shape, and very similar in overall appearance. This flies in the face of Apple’s own human interface guidelines, which state:
Each toolbar icon should be easily and quickly distinguishable from the other items in the toolbar. Toolbar icons emphasize their outline form, rather than subtler visual details

The whole article by John Siracusa on os x tiger is definitely worth reading. Mailstamps brings back the old buttons in all their irregular glory.

Organising you email

If you are one of those people who likes to sort their mail into 43 different folders based on project, due date, star sign etc then MailActOn will be perfect for you. Basically you select a message and hit the ` (backtick - the Act-On menu key) and up pops a menu (a very sexy-transparent one) and then you press a number corresponding to the rule you want to apply- the cunning thing about MailActOn is it uses the Mail.app rules to do the heavy lifting so writing sorting rules is easy. Anyway have a look at the site to get a better explanation. Also by the same developer is MailTags- this hack lets you add metadata (like keywords, notes, project, due dates) to your email messages and then you can use this data to make truly smart mailboxes- much too organised for me! Both are donation-ware and available now

New mail sounds and speech

Another obvious (and hardly original) change that must be made is to change the incoming mail sound. I have chosen sound of the TARDIS re-materialising or maybe even an auton gun if that makes me a geek then so be it.

Another way of doing sound notifications is with speech- there are a couple of ways of doing this. The Mail.app rules allow you to run an AppleScript- and AppleScripts can easily turn text into speech. You could get you computer to read out your messages as they arrive (this would be very useful if you have your Mac set up to your stereo- there is no reason to have to look at the screen). I won’t go through how to do it because it’s been done elsewhere very adequately. This is probably the best method but maybe doesn’t sound the coolest- but you can get it to say the email subject and anything else you want.

An easier alternative for those who don’t like the Apple voices (they don’t seem to have improved in about 10 years) is to use the AT&T text to speech service- for example get Juilette to say “bonjour! nouveau message de hrmpf.com“ or maybe you need a German saying “achtung! neues email vom hrmpf.com“ or perhaps just some posh (and drunk?) English people prattling on.

How about the equivalent of custom ringtones for your Mail.app- what better way to let you know the boss has just emailed than playing “it’s the end of the world as we know it” from your iTunes library.

Conclusions

Ok, so i haven’t been to revolutionary in taking an axe to Mail.app but if you want to further customise your Mail.app there is a good summary of plugins and tools at tikouka.net and of course lots of applescripts and automator workflows that could revolutionise Mail.app in just the right way… but that’s another story…