Mail.app

Gmail IMAP Settings, Straight from the Google's Mouth

wood.tang — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:55:27 -0500

This may not count as a real ﬁnd since it’s on the Google’s own support site, but this list of recommended IMAP client settings is interesting in that it differs from many of the Gmail IMAP how-to’s I’ve seen so far.

Regarding Sent mail:

Do NOT save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail’s SMTP server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.

…and Junk folders:

Do NOT enable your client’s junk mail ﬁlters. Gmail’s spam ﬁlters also work in your IMAP client, and we recommend turning off any additional anti-spam or junk mail ﬁlters within your client. Your client’s ﬁlter will attempt to download and classify all of your existing messages, which may slow down your client until the process is complete.

I adjusted my Mail.app settings and noticed some marginal improvements. A big difference is that their advice for Trash results in archiving every single message in All Mail, whether you delete it from your client or not.

”Gmail IMAP Settings, Straight from the Google's Mouth” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

A Week with Leopard's New iCal and Mail.app

wood.tang — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:33:11 -0500

While most sensible Mac users were looking forward to cool new features in Leopard like Cover Flow, Quick Look, and Time Machine, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, itching to try out iCal and Mail.app’s new to-do list integration. I agree with Merlin’s approach to using a bunch of single-purpose applications that are very good at what they do instead of a bloated piece of do-everything-ware like Outlook–“a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife”–as he put it, but I looked forward to a little bit of teamwork between two of the applications I use the most. And boy, am I disappointed.

I’ve professed my love for iCal here repeatedly, but the biggest reason I like it is that I can manage my entire pile of stuff within its colorful, round-cornered conﬁnes. I keep my projects and responsibility lists there, my someday/maybe items, all of my next actions. I litter the calendar with reminders and subscribe to my favorite teams’ schedules.

I never felt the need for super-tight integration with my email before; if something important came via email, I usually banged out a corresponding to-do item, and ﬁled the message away where I could ﬁnd it later. I start to get twitchy when I have to look in too many different places for my stuff, which is why I’ve always turned away from high-powered task managers like OmniFocus. To me, what I have to do consists of my calendar and my to-do list, and I want that all in one place.

That being said, I was intrigued by Leopoard Mail.app’s new ability to create to-do items directly out of an email, partly because I have a fetish for that stuff, and sadly, because it looked cool. So the ﬁrst thing I did after installing Leopard was try it out. That’s where the problems began.

The To-Do Two-Step

The initial import of my context calendars and to-do items from iCal seemed to be static. If I made changes to them either in Mail or iCal, nothing synced between the two. If I created a new item it worked, so I chalked it up to an upgrade issue, but I noticed later that to-do items I created solely on local iCal calendars wouldn’t disappear from Mail’s list if I deleted them from iCal.

Next, I tried creating a to-do item from one of my emails, which, forgive me for being slow, was confusing at ﬁrst. I thought I could just select a message, click the to-do button, and assign a description. This is at least the way I’ve thought about email tasks in the past, something like “Call Joe to talk about Mary’s email,” which refers me to said message, not necessarily a speciﬁc sentence in it.

Instead, to create a to-do from Mail, you have to select a piece of text from your message, which then becomes your task description. This is all ﬁne and dandy if it was easy to edit that text to suit your needs. But how often does someone email you a perfect explanation of what to do? Right. So once I ﬁgured this part out, I tried editing the description, but Mail would repeatedly skip back to the beginning and replace what I typed with the original text. Sometimes it took me two or three tries to get it right.

I believe this has something to do with my Mail set up. I pipe everything through a Gmail account, which I now check via IMAP. In this arrangement, Mail actually stores the to-do items as messages in your mail account. In fact, every time you sync you Gmail account, Mail writes a new version of the message. I didn’t realize this until I looked at my Gmail archive and saw seven copies of each to-do.

I did some unscientiﬁc testing by watching the activity window in Mail, and I think that when I started to create a to-do item out of a message, Mail immediately synced with Gmail. If I tried editing the description before it ﬁnished, it replaced my text with the original version, now living on the server. I realized I could prevent this from happening by waiting a few seconds to edit, but c’mon, that isn’t why I use a Mac. The same thing happened if I created a new to-do item in iCal and tried to make a quick change.

To make matters worse, Mail seems to get confused about discrepancies between the local and server versions of these to-do “messages” very easily. A dialog box asking me if I wanted to keep the local or server version popped up repeatedly, and would loop endlessly unless I chose the server version.

Calendars, Calendars Everywhere

Another problem I encountered is how Mail and iCal allocate their calendars. Like many GTD-centric iCal users, I make separate calendars for different to-do lists. But Mail doesn’t see these calendars; instead, you have to create separate ones that live within the mail account.

I tried to get around this limitation by creating mail to-do’s in a temporary calendar then moving them to my main ones, but if you move a to-do item from one calendar to another with a different name, it breaks the link to the mail message, which defeats the whole purpose of this tortuous exercise. The only workaround I see is to create duplicate sets of calendars in both iCal and your mail account. If you move to-do’s between calendars with the same name, the link is preserved, but again, I use a Mac so I don’t have to do shit like that.

These special mail calendars also can’t sync with iPods through iTunes. Maybe the forthcoming Leopard version of Missing Sync for Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile PDA users will tackle this, but there’s no reason they should have all the fun. I know the iPod’s PIM features don’t exactly get people rioting on the streets, but on that mythical day when the iPhone gets a to-do list and syncs it through iTunes, one would hope that this gets ﬁxed.

As useful as they might be when you can actually create one, to-do’s with attached mail messages also screw up my new favorite trick, the aforementioned “Ass Pocket of iCal.” If you print your to-do list, and any of the items have attached messages, iCal tosses either a messy local URL or huge block of ASCII gobbledegook in the notes ﬁeld. This is a cosmetic problem that irritates a particular sore spot for me, I know, but it’s just another item in a long list of disappointments.

Do Over

I won’t go so far as calling Mail.app’s to-do functionality half-assed, but it also appears to be tacked on as an afterthought. I might have complicated matters by throwing an IMAP account into the mix, but I can’t imagine that Apple doesn’t have software testers on staff who think about this kind of stuff. But then again, maybe I’m asking them to cater to too speciﬁc a need. Mail does offer some nifty hooks into iCal, like recognizing dates and times and letting you create a new event, but the rest of its integration is just confusing and messy.

By itself, Mail’s to-do’s work ﬁne, and if you feel the need to liberate lots of actions from messages, maybe you should consider doing most of your work there. But if you’re a heavy iCal user like me, or ﬁnd yourself thinking about getting some hot Mail-on-iCal action going, you need to wait for Apple to try again.

”A Week with Leopard's New iCal and Mail.app” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: What default settings would you change?

Merlin — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:02:06 -0400

As I am wont to do, I was thinking out loud on Twitter this morning.

I’m convinced that, for better or worse, a lot of computer-related habits come straight out of using the default settings. For example a stock Mail.app install checks your email every 5 minutes (I reset mine to ‘Manual’) and, without interdiction, Apple’s mail program will also create all your new messages as “Rich Text” (Nuh uh. Mine? ‘Plain Text’).

And then, in some cases, even if you want to do things differently, you have to swim upstream to do so. In the case above, I can’t set iCal or gCal’s default to anything but 1 hour (any more than I can autoset multiple alarms¹). God only knows what poor John Gruber would give to have Mail.app more easily let people quit top-posting.

The Question to You:

What default settings would you love to change in popular applications? Taken a step further, what excellent habits could be taught to users by looking at defaults as something beyond familiarity and day one ease-of-use? Could the aggressive use of smart or personalized defaults create a generation of short-meeting-makers and intersperse-responders?

”Vox Pop: What default settings would you change?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 21, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind)

Merlin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:36:29 -0400

For some time now, I’ve encouraged people to consider abandoning the byzantine folder structure that most of us used to employ to “organize” our email. In fact, this kind of functional simplicity is something I’ve started to think of as a pillar of Inbox Zero.

In addition to helping explode the myth that most email messages have any life once their actions have been liberated, it’s a healthy habit to actively remove any unnecessary systematic ﬁddling that doesn’t handsomely pay back the effort that habitually goes into it.

And, as ever: yes, some of you – because of the incredibly unique nature of your work in an ofﬁce – will need to have 500 taxonomic mailboxes, a monthly archives by project, a person-by-person collection going back to 1983, and a multiply-copied CC’d team archives, coded by color and identiﬁed with helpful icons you found on Gopher in 1992. Sure, why not. If that’s working for you, by all means, keep ﬁddling and ﬁling.

But, if you’re ready to admit you might be turning a crank that’s potentially not hooked-up to anything, here’s my four favorite ways to leverage the intelligence of Mail.app for drop-dead simple archiving.

[also, some prior art from April: Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes]

1. Regular Old Search

An astonishing amount of email can be found with nothing more than a search on “From,” “Subject,” or the occasional “Entire Message.” If you just need to see whether you’ve ever gotten email from a person, this is the easiest and fastest way. In fact, I can’t think of a way to even do this with regular mailboxes, so score one for Search.

What you’re not doing: Maintaining an insane collection of by-person manual mailboxes. I’ve heard of people who get a message that went to ﬁve people, then manually copy it to ﬁve folders – one for each of the recipients. People like this need more work and, possibly a Ritalin. (See also below: Address Book Group Smart Mailboxes)

2. Smart Mailbox: Date Ranges

A Smart Mailbox for email you’ve received in the last 3 days will cover so much of your basic archive-retrieval needs – meaning the times when you actually will need to see archived email (versus your elaborate fantasies about the day 10 years from now when you theoretically cover your ass and embarrass everyone you hate). Winnowing of this kind not only makes for faster scanning, but it will greatly speed up sorting and searching, of course.

My “Sent in the last 4 days” Smart Mailbox also gets a big workout, as well as “To Respond – 2 days” which is any email I’ve received in the last 2 days and ﬂagged for response.

What you’re not doing: Building a rabbit hutch that requires you to manually drag crap into folders where the contents will die within a few days. A Smart Mailbox knows how to keep things fresh and avoids the need for unnecessary metawork and “thinking.”

3. Smart Mailbox: Address Book Groups

It’s mindblowing to me that even some power users don’t know about this time-saver. You can create manual or Smart Groups in Address Book that are then exposed for Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app

Ideas for this?

clients on a project (Smart Group with shared Company name)
friends in your city (Smart Group with shared City or area codes)
colleagues at a remote ofﬁce (Smart Group with shared Company name or email domain AND City/State)
Family (Smart Group with shared family surnames + names of in-laws, etc.)

Related: I’d also suggest making a new person-based Smart Mailbox any time you ﬁnd yourself corresponding a lot with a new person, especially if it’s on an urgent project that will likely sunset in the next little while. Work, work work, and then when your exchanges slow down, just delete the Mailbox and you’re done. No need to re-re-re-organize.

What you’re not doing: Again, you’re not struggling and fussing over where stuff goes in order to keep access easy. You can trust that all your stuff is one single location, then just let Apple’s magic do all your heavy lifting.

4. Smart Mailbox: Tagged Messages

With a plug-in like Mail Tags you can easily add simple taxonomic terms for the kind of messages that you used to ﬁle by hand. But, seriously: keep it as simple as you can possibly stand. Maybe even down to a few really basic categories for all non-actionable & reference email.

Orders & Receipts
Tracking Numbers
Accounts & Passwords
Yay Me: Compliments and Résumé-builders

What you’re not doing: No longer ﬁddling with a hierarchical maze in order to know your login and purchase info can be pulled up when you eventually need it.

The Acceptable Exception: Really Old Mail

Depending on your life and work, you might want to consider archiving (as in removing to a backup someplace) any mail that’s more than a couple years old. This should speed up your searches a bit, and will certainly improve the quality of any search-based results.

But if it’s important to you to keep this around, maybe create an “Annual Archive” mailbox, with manual sub-folders for all mail received in each given year. I’m not sure how much this buys you from a semantic standpoint, but my suspicion is that it might be kinder on Mail’s resources to not have a single, bajillion-item mailbox (any Apple pros want to chime in?).

As with all this stuff, YMMV. But consider whether the effort you put into ﬁling pays off often enough to be worth the hassle. In my experience, it’s no contest: smart wins.

So, anything I missed? Got a Smart Mailbox that saves your ass from ﬁddly archiving?

”How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 16, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes

Merlin — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:42:47 -0400

It took me a while, but ever since I’ve gotten my head around Smart Folders (and Smart Playlists and Smart Groups, etc.), I’ve started to think about the way I use my Mac a bit differently.

Clearly iTunes is the winner in this regard (watch for an upcoming multi-part series about Smart Playlists on The Merlin Show), but the Finder, and Address Book, and Mail.app also have an amazing amount of power rumbling under the hood. So, in the interest of spreading the love, here’s four Mail.app Smart Mailboxes that have been rocking my world over the last months.

Inbox, Flagged

This super-basic mailbox is great for whenever you’re processing your Inbox(es). You can blow through all the incoming messages, quickly ﬂag anything that needs a response (CMD-SHIFT-L), then view this Smart Mailbox to visually separate the wheat from the chaff. Select all, move them to your “To Respond” folder, and off you go.

Recently Sent

Like the previous Smart Mailbox, this simpleton makes it easy to bubble-up messages that you often need to refer to, but that can be a pain to locate the old-fashioned way. Just shows you any messages you’ve sent to other people in the last couple days. Yeah, it’s obvious, but, man, will you ever love this once you remember it’s there.

[ also via Red Sweater Blog - Mail Smart Folders ]

From a given Address Book group

In Address Book:

In Mail.app:

A lot of folks don’t realize that Smart Groups even exist in Address Book. Consequently, even fewer know that the contents of both ad hoc and Smart Groups can be searched on from inside Mail.app.

So in this example, I’ve created a Smart Group with everyone in my Address Book who lives in San Francisco, then I tell Mail.app to group all those peoples’ emails in one place.

This is also swell for seeing messages from a company you work with a lot, and it’s fantastic for grouping all the email from people in your family.

These particular kind of mailboxes can often be enhanced by ticking off the “Include messages from Sent” box – that way you also see your own emails to people in this group, allowing you to view your conversations in threads. (Note that this is a lot less useful if your own Address Book entry matches the saved criteria :-) )

If you ﬁnd yourself searching or – God forbid – manually hunting for certain kinds of messages again and again, try to think of a way that Mail.app Smart Mailboxes can do the heavy lifting for you. And, if you add to the mix something like Mail Tags (which adds several very useful search abilities), you can have a lot of automated sexy happening in your email.

Edit: 2007-04-23 11:56:23: Nomenclature corrected – As Jean points out in comments, these are properly called “Smart Mailboxes” not “Smart Folders.” Thanks, Jean!

”Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

Merlin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:25:42 -0500

tow.com » MsgFiler

Lots of the kids are excited about the arrival of MsgFiler, which is a neat litte app for helping you ﬁle away your messages in Mail.app:

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.

Zesty.

But I’ll just play devil’s advocate on this one: if you ﬁnd yourself inordinately excited about the arrival of this (admittedly clever) application, there’s an excellent chance that your email archiving system is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, is in need of a major streamlining. Discuss.

Me? Here’s my own folder hierarchy (and the Mail Act-on key I use to send selected messages there.):

INBOX
To Respond (CTRL-R)
Archived (CTRL-A)
- Receipts and things I Bought (CTRL-B)
- Passwords and account info (CTRL-P)

That’s it. Personally, I abandoned the byzantine ﬁling system quite a while ago, and so far – given a mindful combination of Smart Folders and Spotlight – I’ve yet to ﬁnd a compelling case for manually ﬁling beyond a depth of more than one folder.

So, my larger question for you guys with more than, say, ﬁve or so archive sub-folders:

How often are you using your archiving hierarchy to retrieve old mail? In other words, give me your success stories and best practices by which the time spent on meticulous manual ﬁling has paid outsize rewards in ﬁnding stuff later. Or, perhaps better put: what are the limitations of Smart Folders, and what would need to change about them to get you out of the manual ﬁling routine?

Because, I gotta tell you, it kinda seems like a lot of busy work given what seems like modest functional pay-off. But you school me…

”Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 17, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?

Merlin — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:26:58 -0400

I open the ﬂoor to all of you on a question of particular personal interest to me: How are you using Mail Tags?

While my uses of it to date have been helpful, I keep getting the feeling I’m not getting all that I can out of it – especially since the ability to associate Projects, Priorities, etc. to a message could make for some really enticing Smart Folders.

I wonder if my question is ultimately more taxonomic in nature – ultimately more about Spotlight in general or Tags in very very general: When tagging items on your Mac, what kind of ‘-onomy’ are you using? How strictly do you enforce your vocabulary? What are the best practices for someone who’s new to this?

Conﬁdential to Mr. Thomas Vander Wal: if you turn up here and school me a bit on this, I’ll totally buy you a Coke. If you write a guest post on it, I’ll buy you a beefsteak and two cocktails. Seriously. Steak.

”Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 18, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Process email faster with Mail Act-On

Merlin — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:56:00 -0400

My usage of Mail Act-On, while far from novel, has revolutionized the speed with which I can blow through email processing.

If you’ve never seen it before, Mail Act-On is a very clever Mail.app plugin that lets you create key commands that execute Rules you’ve generated in your Preferences. Sounds pretty dull, right? Absolutely. Until you start putting this stuff into action and learn how painfully slow all that draggy mc drag drag business is. Here’s how I’ve set mine up.

Step 0: Remap “`Caps Lock`”

First off: do yourself the biggest favor ever, and make that stupid “Caps Lock” key into something more useful. In the months since I ﬁrst mentioned remapping this typewriter relic using third-party utilities, the folks behind OS X have been kind enough to bake it right into the Keyboard & Mouse PreferencePane (“[Apple] > System Preferences... > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard > Modifier Keys”).

As your attorney, I advise you to immediately map “Caps Lock” to “Ctrl” since it’s about to make your life a little better, thanks to Mail Act-On – which relies heavily on the “Ctrl” key, as you’ll see – although you’ll get way faster at many key commands as a result. Plus it doesn’t bend your pinky up all weird.

Okay, with that nonsense out of the way, let’s go make some rules.

(Important: If you’ve never set up Mail Act-On rules before, there’s a few things you’ll need to know, so be sure to ﬁrst check out the FAQ).

To archive

This ﬁrst one is really basic, although it’s certainly the one I use most – moving selected messages to my Archive folder.

That should be mostly self-explanatory, except remember that you can only add currently-visible mailbox sub-folders to a Mail.App rule. If you can’t ﬁnd the folder you want, cancel out and make sure it’s ﬁrst visible in your mailboxes and folders list over on the left (ﬂip the little “reveal” triangle until you can see the folder you want).

Next up, it gets a bit more interesting.

To respond

This one is a workhorse; it takes the selected messages, ﬂags them, and moves them into my Respond folder.

As I’ve said, I use a combination of ﬂagging and mailbox location to create Smart Folders – that way I can quickly glance, say, messages I’ve received 3-7 days ago that still need a response.

Handy way to catch up or just to make sure things don’t fall between the cracks.

To respond…some time

The next one shows a really simple example of how you can make Mail Act-On work in concert with its muscle-bound big brother, Mail Tags.

In this case I’m adding a priority tag that – again with Smart Folders – gives me control over what kind of un-responded email I want to see. This rule gets a workout whenever I get mission-critical epistles like “Will you review my $500 Windows app?” and “You should totally link to photos of my kitty!”

Like most GTD-ers, I don’t like to rely too heavily on prioritization as its own thing, but if I’m traveling or whenever things get really hectic for a few days, I need a fast way to separate the wheat from the chaff, and this helps a lot with that.

I’m really just scratching the surface on what you can do with Mail Act-On – I’m sure there are power users out there who are doing much sexier stuff with it – but I wanted to make sure people know that this is most deﬁnitely not just for geeks and high-volume email users. In my opinion, this is functionality that should (and eventually will) be included as a stock feature in Mail.app.

As I said in Inbox Zero, excellent processing is one of the ninja email moves. And for even the most casual user of Mail.app, Mail Act-On can make that road to ninjahood so much faster and less annoying.

”Process email faster with Mail Act-On” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Glenn Wolsey: 6 email tips

Merlin — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 08:53:43 -0400

Glenn Wolsey—6 Ways To Organize - Your Mail Application

Glenn Wolsey has a great little post on how he’s set up and is using Mail.app. He’s got some very smart stuff here, including an intriguing approach to minimalist mailbox management:

Create 3 folders and name them Follow-Up, Interesting & To Do. Then, as you check your emails ﬁle them straight into the applicable folder.

Later, when you have time you can go straight to these folders folder and work through them. It will be much quicker to see what needs attending to and you are more likely to might be motivated to spare a few minutes clearing your to-do folder.

The “Interesting” folder is a new one to me, and, although I personally favor a more verb-y approach to my email buckets, that would be a cool way to bubble up stuff you don’t want to miss after a big round of processing.

As we covered in Inbox Zero, it’s all about liberating the actions out of your mail. Like any of this stuff, if the system makes sense to you and gives you transparent affordances for instantly knowing “where it goes” and “what you need to do about it,” then you’re on to something.

Nice work, Glenn!

”Glenn Wolsey: 6 email tips” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Open Thread: Leopard Preview

Merlin — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 12:27:01 -0400

Apple - Apple - Mac OS X - Leopard Sneak Peek

Like most of you, I’m keeping an eye on today’s previewed features of the upcoming “Leopard” (OS X 10.5) release.

Looks like some interesting ideas – many of which, as usual, seem inspired by existing third-party products.

I think I’m most intrigued so far by the idea of “to-do” functionality from within Mail.app (thanks for the tip, Matt); let’s hope that also means I can deep link to a given email from my iCal task list. I also welcome the concept of built-in email templates – although I’m kind of bummed that they seem more focused on execrable 1999-style HTML emails than on the kind of functional time-savers found in the peerless MailTemplate.

To be honest, on ﬁrst blush – and I’m sure there’s much more to come by the time of release – this feels a bit cute and a little light on really revolutionary stuff (the long overdue promise of something like Time Machine notwithstanding). Stuff like (yet. more.) iLife integration is handy enough for the notional Swithcher and Grandpa Joe, but in general I guess I’m hoping for some serious power-user improvements to the core functionality. Maybe that’s just me.

What do you think? What’s “Yeah!” and what’s “Meh?” Anybody else holding out hope for some really deep Finder rewriting and more functional iCal updates?

Other coverage

”Open Thread: Leopard Preview” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 07, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"