Mail.app tips & tricks

I still haven’t found any mail client I really like on the Mac… I’ve been using Thunderbird now for a while, but it doesn’t really have what I want in a mail client. I guess I’m spoiled, since I’m used to using KMail at home (and I’m forced to use Lotus Notes at work - a horrible client from a usability point of view).

Recently I’ve been trying to get Mail.app¹ to work for me. It doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles I like, but after looking up some things online it’s getting there.

Here are some handy things for Mail.app to fix some of it’s shortcomings:

• Adding custom headers to outgoing mails:
  Type this in Terminal.app:
  defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "me@mydomain.tld"; }'
  Ofcourse you can replace the header with what you want, I used this to send a BCC copy to myself of every mail sent out)
• Adding multiple mail addresses (aliases) to one mail account:
  You can type them in the “Email Address” field, separated by comma’s.

• “Go to next unread message”:
  Use something like Fastscripts with the following AppleScript (from Macscripter)

  tell application "Mail" to try  
  tell message viewer 1 to set selected messages to {first message of beginning of (get selected mailboxes) whose read status is false}  
  activate  
  on error  
  beep  
  end try
  

What I still need:

• A way to improve the threading - it’s horrible
• An easy way to switch from mailbox to mailbox through all the ones with unread messages

Let’s see if I find some way to fix those two… especially the threading.

1. Internet Archive snapshot. Original URL: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail.html  ↩︎