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Indev Software Mail Act-On 2

Ray Aguilera — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:03:00 -0600

For Mail power users, Act-On is a must-have. Go. Download. Now.

Apple Mail gets the job done, but there are a few crucial features missing. Rules can sort messages as they arrive, but Mail doesn’t offer much to help you organize messages after the fact. Indev Software’s Mail Act-On is a hugely useful Mail plug-in to do just that and much more. Using rules and user-configurable keystrokes, Mail Act-On can easily tame even the most unruly inbox. And compatibility with Indev’s MailTags (4 Stars, Sept/08) turns Mail Act-On into an organizational powerhouse.

At its core, Mail Act-On is a keyboard-based front end for Mail rules. Act-On will allow you to invoke rules on the fly via a pop-up menu or with a custom keystroke. After installing the plug-in, your Rules pane in Mail Preferences will sport three tabs. Inbox Rules will show all your standard Mail rules. Outbox Rules will show rules for sent messages—handy for separating your outgoing personal messages from work-related ones or keeping related messages together. Keystroke Rules (our favorite feature) are rules that you have designated to run when you use a custom keystroke. We found them most useful as a method for quickly filing messages into the appropriate mailbox.

Even with our relatively flat structure of only a few mailboxes, being able to easily separate out the actionable emails from the press releases and interoffice messages without leaving the keyboard allows us to whizz through our overstuffed inbox. Act-On makes it easy to navigate mail. Hitting F1 activates the plug-in’s floating window, where you can apply rules, move or copy messages, or navigate to specific mailboxes. The window also searches as you type, making navigating complicated mailbox structures or lengthy rule lists incredibly easy.

InDev Software MailTags

Ray Aguilera — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:15:00 -0500

The MailTags pane lets you add metadata to your messages.

In everything from Gmail to iTunes to the OS X Finder itself, folders are out—tagging and searching are in. It’s somewhat surprising then, that Apple Mail still hasn’t incorporated tags, even as OS X becomes increasingly adept at on-the-fly searching. Enter MailTags, a plug-in for Mail that allows you to assign tags to your email and thereby organize your messages.

MailTags adds an unobtrusive icon—a tag, natch—to the corner of your Mail messages. Click the icon, and a panel slides out where you can add tags to your message. Auto-complete will learn your tags as you use them and suggest as you type. MailTags also gives you options to assign custom Project labels and colors, and you can even add To Dos that will sync up with iCal. Tags can be synched to your IMAP server, for access from different machines. The tagging pane can feel a bit cluttered with all the available options, and adding and removing tags from messages requires quite a bit of clicking (which can be somewhat mitigated by a free Mail plug-in from the developer of MailTags that lets you add custom keyboard shortcuts).

By themselves, tags don’t do anything, but when you add in Mail’s Smart Mailboxes, you can easily slice and dice your messages into infinitely configurable chunks. Finding all your messages tagged “Action” from your coworkers or maybe everything tagged “Top Secret” that’s more than a week old becomes effortless. The real value of tags comes in combining them with each other and with the existing data you already have in your mailbox. And since you can use as many tags as you like on each message, you’ll never have to worry about figuring out exactly where to file a particular item.