To Be Titled

Mac OS X’s Mail.app has quietly bugged me for a long time. I was inspired by minimal Entourage, made some changes to my usual set-up, and Mail.app no longer bugs me. Here’s Minimal Mail.app.

Three Mail.app plug-ins, Mail.app smart mailboxes and a custom setting in the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane make this set-up possible.

• Widemail by Dane Harnett changes the viewing window from the message list on top and message content on the bottom to the former on the left and the latter on the right. It also allows fine-tuned control of what header information to display in the message list and how.
• MailTags by Scott Morrison enables tagging individual messages by keywords and projects, among other nice features.
• Smart mailboxes in Mail.app along with MailTags let me create useful mailboxes—-messages sent and received “Today”; messages keyworded as “@action,” or “@waiting”; messages marked with project titles for current classes I’m teaching and for current research projects I’m working on. The “Today” smart mailbox is displayed in the screenshot. (I took the screenshot before I received or sent any messages during the day.)
• I hide the list of mailboxes (View -> Hide Mailboxes; or shift-cmd-M). I can navigate among all the mailboxes, including the smart ones, by using MailAct-On. Cmd-F1 in MailAct-On is configured to pop up the HUD for “Open Mailbox…”. (MailAct-On also lets me assign/remove keywords and project affiliations with custom keyboard shortcuts.)
• Lastly, I hide the toolbar, which when shown, only contains the search field. I have configured the keyboard shortcut cmd-opt-T to show and hide the toolbar in the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane. (Mail.app does not have a built-in shortcut for the command.)