Apple Mail plug-in roundup

#36: Reuben, I know of at least one that is in the works. I *think* it might be made available for free, but don't quote me. Scott Morrison, developer of MailTags and Mail Act-On, is currently beta testing a plugin called Total Mail that does exactly what you want. You can get in touch with him through his site, http://www.indev.ca/, and might be able to request a copy of a Total Mail beta.

One feature I am still missing : I am still more of an Entourage person, than Mail user, cause the one thing I'd really like to see in Mail is a date split in the Mailboxes and inboxes. Those useful bars that split your mailboxes into mail from 'Today', 'Yesterday', 'Last Week', 'This Year' etc.
All sorts of smart mailboxes and colourlabelling has got nothing on these date bars! Bring them over to Mail!

Is there any plugin that will list the number of messages in individual folders? I use a GTD-like approach to Mail and would like to know how many items are in my "action required", "review", "defer", etc. folder. I don't find using smart folders as an ideal way to do this...

#31: They aren't very clear about it (I can't find a menu option), but you can actually drag any of your inboxes or folders to the Desktop or a folder in the Finder to automatically create an MBOX export of that inbox/folder. A huge stink was made about this when Cory Doctorow made a big fuss about Apple and open standards, and a lot of people offered this and a few other tricks as options and evidence that Mail indeed does export to an open format; it just isn't very clear about it.

However, this might be documented in Mail's manual, though I've never checked.

#29: It isn't a sidebar item, but you can go to Window > Address Panel to open a floating panel of all your Address Book contacts, complete with any Groups you've created. It isn't a built-in panel, but I personally find it much handier due to the Group support.

#23: You can easily create some Rules to apply colors to messages based on Address Book Groups. Simply create a group in Address Book - Smart Group or otherwise - add contacts to it. Then, in the Rules pane of Mail's preferences, simply create a rule that uses the 'In Address Book Group' criteria, and 'set message color' at the bottom of that dialog as the action. I do this myself for a few specific contacts and a couple of groups.

I don't like Apple Mail for one BIG reason. I believe Apple designed Apple Mail to lock users into using Apple Mail. (e.g Apple Mail uses its own Mail Formats which are likely proprietary for storing EMAIL mesages and mail addresses.

As a result, you cannot easily export Apple MAIL messages into a standard .mbox format. Nor can you easily export the Address Book into a standard format like .ldif. In my view, Apple wants to lock you in to its world.

I wish someone made some Apple mail plugins to address these major shortcomings to Apple Mail. (I know there are some stand alone programs to address these export shortcomings).

Even though it is not really Mac Like, I have been using Thunderbird. Open Source software does not try to lock you into proprietary formats (like Apple tries to do).

Not to be a pessimist or anything, but are most of these plugins, input managers? The reason I ask is because as I'm sure you already know input manager will be pretty much gone in Leopard?

Hi, friends, mail appetizer is great when things are real busy. I just miss one thing, sometimes I receive crucial emails, with very, very private and confidential info -that's my job- and I would like to password protect the start-up of mail.app from other people around
is there a way to do this? been researching, but i don't think so.
two accounts doesn't convince me

Something I'd like to see is a plugin that adds in a "Contacts" pane in the side bar beneath the folders, a la Outlook Express and Gmail. Thunderbird has one, but I've not found anything for Mail.app...