Once again, it's time for another edition of Ask TUAW: the place where we try to answer all of your Mac and Apple-related questions. This week we're taking questions about bypassing the Apple registration screen, installing Leopard Server on the latest Mac Mini, AppleCare for iPhone version 1.0 and more.

As always, we welcome your suggestions for this week and questions for next time. Please leave your contributions in the comments for this post. When asking questions, please include which Mac and which version of OS X you're running. If you don't specify, we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac.

Tom asks:

When I do an install of OSX or after bringing home a new Mac I get to a screen that asks me to register. If I don't want to fill out that information in is there any way to bypass it?

Sure. Once you get to the registration screen simply press the Command and Q keys and you will see a new dialog box come up. On it, one of your choices will be to "Skip" the registration process. Simply click it and you'll move on to the next screen to create your user account and finish the setup of OSX.

John asks:

I have a Leopard Server installer DVD from last year and I'm having trouble installing the software on one of the new Mac Minis. It won't even boot the Mini nor will it work when I try upgrading OSX client to server. Once it installs I get endless restarts, etc. What's the best way to accomplish this?

If you were one of the many users who upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.6 soon after it came out, then you might have experienced some major problems on your Mac. Fortunately, Apple has admitted there were issues with the update. Now there are more updates to fix the problems.

Last night, Apple released a Mail update for users experiencing problems with Mail unexpectedly quitting. "This can be caused by using a copy of Mail that wasn't updated properly (you may need to install the Mail Update)," the update page states.

If you have been experiencing problems with Mail.app post-10.5.6, then you can install the update by visiting the Support Downloads website and download the installer package.


Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

I find the Mail.app plugin Widemail extremely useful. At my day job I use Outlook and the widescreen view is very efficient for space management. Prior to upgrading to Leopard, I used the application Letterbox written about here; however in my recent search for a Mail-enhancing plugin I wanted something a little more robust. Enter Widemail. It not only provides the awesome widescreen view from Letterbox, but it provides a means for creating a two-line message row similar to that found in Outlook for Windows and Entourage on the Mac.

Since we last wrote about Widemail the developer has added a preference pane within Mail.app making it easier to tweak settings. Additionally, the Widemail custom column can now have items that are left-aligned and right-aligned within the same row. Everyone's favorite automatic self-update framework, Sparkle, has been added as well.

Widemail makes Mail.app exceptionally more functional for my day-to-day use and is a free download (as in, feel free to make a donation).

[via Lifehacker]

Have you ever been reading an email in Leopard's Mail.app and thought, "Oh, I need to remember that"? If you can right click, then you can remember anything, quickly and easily, using Todos. When you come across something in an email you want to remember, first highlight the text.

Next, right-click on it and select "New Todo." The current message window will then show a notepad-style view of the selected text. From there, you can change the due date and priority. Finally, assign that todo to the iCal calendar of your choice by clicking the orange arrow/circle beside the item.

Mail displays Todos in the sidebar. To see your tasks in iCal, select "Show To Do List" from the "View" menu.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

While most people are probably satisfied to send their photos from iPhoto through their Gmail accounts using Mail, some people would rather have a more direct option. For example, sending large files through Mail seems to be no problem for me, yet from the same network with exactly the same settings, my wife's Mail chokes and spits and frequently fails when she tries to send a bunch (or even a few) pictures from iPhoto.

Tired of playing with her SMTP settings and getting everything working for one message, just to have it fail on the next one, I finally went in search of a more direct approach. My wife and I are both "switchers," and back in Windows we were used to Picasa, which has the ability to send photos via a Gmail account built-in. Makes sense, since Google owns Picasa, but that's exactly what I was looking hoping to get iPhoto to do.

In my searches I came across an iPhoto plugin called iPhoto2Gmail. When I tried it last week, it hung my iPhoto instance every time I tried it and I had to force quit iPhoto. I gave up on iPhoto2Gmail, but couldn't find anything else. In desperation, I went back to have another look at iPhoto2Gmail and discovered that it had been updated to version 1.0. Crossing my fingers, I gave it a try, and... it works great!

Though I don't need it on my machine, I really like the direct simplicity of sending my photos from right inside iPhoto, and I think I'll continue to use iPhoto2Gmail. If you've been struggling with sending photos through a Gmail account, this might be a useful option for you.

Have you used Mail's stationery and thought that it was too limiting or did not appeal to your tastes? With a simple save button, you can create your own stationery to be exactly the way you want it. Just create a new Mail message, filling in the body as you see fit -- use special formatting, colors, even filler text.

When you have completed your stationery template, click File > Save As Stationery. A dialog box will prompt you to name your new creation. Enter a descriptive title and click "Save." Your new stationery will appear under "Custom" whenever you click the "Show Stationery" button in a new mail message. Clicking your template name will automatically recreate your template in the body of the new message.

This is handy for businesses or individuals who need to have custom formatted emails, and need them to be uniform each time they send them.


Like this tip? Want more? Just visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

There are some people that like the sleekness of HTML email, then there are those that appreciate the simplicity of plain text email (no images or styled text, thanks very much). If you use Mail.app and want it to force all incoming email to display as plain text, then open Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Now when you receive an email, Mail.app will only show you the plain text of the message. To reverse this command, just replace "TRUE" with "FALSE."

Like this tip? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections for more.

A loyal reader recently sent in a tip asking us had we seen a dialog in Mail.app. The dialog in question is produced when creating a new note and pressing command + b. You would expect it to be a shortcut for bold, but no ... it brings up the above dialog.

The dialog specifies that by converting the note to Rich Text, devices such as the iPhone will not be able to edit it. Could this be a sign that notes syncing between iPhone and Mail.app could be coming in the not so distant future? We can only hope so.

Thanks for the tip, Shayan!

Update: As some have mentioned in the comments, iPhone notes syncing was an expected, but not released feature of iPhone 2.0.

Recently, a friend asked me to create an AppleScript that would allow him to automate To-Dos with a Mail.app mail rule. I immediately rose to the occasion because this was a cool idea: Mail.app could run the script when you get an ebill, for instance, for your car payment. The script would then create an iCal To-Do for "Pay your car payment, now!"

The script
set theSumm to "Pay My Bill Soon!"
set dueDate to (current date) + 10 * days
set theUrl to "http://www.paymybillexample.com"
set thepriority to 1

tell application "iCal"
make todo at end of events of (item 1 of every calendar) with properties {summary:theSumm, due date:dueDate, url:theUrl, priority:thepriority}
end tell

Customizing the script
To customize the To-Do's title, fill in the text you want, within the parenthesis on line 1. To Change the due date, change the "10" in line 2 to the number of days until it is due. If you want to change to weeks or months, use the appropriate wordage instead of "days" at the end of line 2. To change the URL, paste a URL in the parenthesis on line 3.

By default, the script will set the newly created To-Do to have a priority of 1, however, you can change this to your priority preference.

Continue reading to learn how to integrate the To-Dos with a Mail.app mail rule.

Adam Tow's MsgFiler plug-in for Mail.app has been a favorite of many Mac users since it was first released in 2006. In the succinct words of Mr. Tow:

"MsgFiler is a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly files emails into existing mailbox folders. MsgFiler's fast searching means you just have to type a few characters to find the right mailbox. Move selected messages with a click or open a mailbox without having to navigate the mailbox folder pane. MsgFiler is optimized for keyboard-only usage, perfect for Apple Mail power users."

Version 2.0.3 has just arrived on the scene, with a new installer app and refinement of the interface being the two big changes. MsgFiler now works properly on HFS+ Case-Sensitve partitions and ignores mailbox directories, and Adam has added a new "Hide mailboxes from inactive and offline accounts" feature for the proverbial icing on the cake.

MsgFiler is shareware ($8) and is available from the tow.com web site, Version Tracker, and other shareware distribution sites.

Among the new features Apple touted in Leopard was data detectors in Mail.app. The idea is that if somebody sends you an email with a street address in it, for example, Mail.app can detect that it's a street address and add it an Address Book contact with just a couple of clicks. Unfortunately, while the basic idea isn't bad, sometimes you just want to copy something and the data detectors simply get in the way (and leads, in my case at least, to some gratuitous cursing).

Well, Michael Tsai has found the solution with a hidden preference. All you have to do is type in (or copy and paste in) one line to the Terminal and the data detectors will be banished from Mail.app. Head on over to Tsai's post for full details and kiss the cursing goodbye.

[via Daring Fireball]

Most desktop messaging clients (Apple's Mail.app and Microsoft's Entourage among them) give users the option to skip loading images when reading rich-formatting emails, which both speeds up the loading/reading process and limits exposure to spammer scavenging, which can leverage embedded images to verify that the evil emails were received by a valid address. The iPhone's version of Mail, however, doesn't give users the option to turn images off, as pointed out by Stefan Seiz. This has been the case all along and hasn't been corrected in 2.0, unfortunately.

While this exposure is less of a problem if you've got good spam filtering in place, it does raise an interesting question: wouldn't an optional images-off mode be ideal if you wanted to speed up your iPhone's mail performance, or (perish the thought!) limit your data usage on a less-than-ideal service plan. Unfortunately I don't think adding features and options to Mail is within the official capacity of third-party devs, so we're going to have to wait for Apple to address this directly.

RelatedMail is a free plugin for Mail.app which "shows messages related to the currently viewed message" in a panel next to the preview pane. It does this by building an index based on message headers and content which it then uses to guess what other messages are relevant to the one you're viewing. In some ways this is similar to threading, but more sophisticated.

At present the plugin is very much in beta and has a variety of known problems, including a serious performance hit as it does its indexing. Nonetheless, it's an interesting idea that shows a lot of promise.

RelatedMail is a free download from Scott Ziegler.

[via Hawk Wings]

Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? Status Screen Saver might just be the screen saver for you. The awesome thing about this screen saver is that is displays your current unread Mail count, unread NetNewsWire feeds, and even unread tweets from Twitterrific. You can select a screen saver that you have installed in the Status Screen Saver options.

Even better, Status Screen Saver allows you to (with some AppleScripting) create your own "modules" which opens up unlimited possibilities to what can be shown in Status Screen Saver. So, if you use something other than the supported applications, you can (if the application is scriptable) make an AppleScript to give a number, then place it in the Screen Saver.saver/Contents/Resources/ directory.

Overall, this is a really cool screen saver which can be expanded upon by the user. You can download this free (donations accepted) screen saver by visiting the developer's website.

We've all been there: you have the Dock set to auto hide and you miss the Mail.app notification telling you there's new mail. Well, don't miss that presidential e-mail again with Mail Unread Menu. This little app sits in your menu bar awaiting your e-mail.

This menu bar application can replace right-clicking on the Mail.app icon in the dock. You can check for new mail, compose a new message, and view the new messages broken down by mail boxes. This application did, however, seem a bit laggy in updating the unread mail count.

You can download Mail Unread Menu 3.1 for free (donations accepted) by visiting the developer's website.