We actually talked about e-mail for 2 hours. But we didn’t want to scare too many people away with our very first podcast so we decided to release this episode in two parts.
In part one we talk about the differences between IMAP and POP and why we prefer IMAP, storing messages, Mobile Me and Gmail services, managing multiple email accounts, Apple Mail, smart folders, rules, spotlight search, data detectors, stationary, thread organization, To-Do management, mail stationary, plug-ins, archiving messages, spam filtering and more.
Part two will be released in about a week where we’ll go in-depth on our various systems for managing email, the pros and cons of each system, developing a good email work flow, learning how not to become a slave to your inbox, email etiquette and other useful tools.
Links of Interest
Apple Mail Add-ons
Task Management
Other Tools
Other Resources
Joe Kissell’s TidBITS IMAP/POP Article
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Another great/fun tool for Mail is “MailBadger”. It allows you to specify specific badges for different mailboxes. So I have a green badge for my Gmail account, Purple for my work account, etc… and then you can see which account has received mail specifically.
http://tonyallevato.com/software/mail-badger/
There’s also another add on, MailAppetizer, is a replacement for GrowlMail. Only reason why I use it is because Safari 4 Beta broke GrowlMail, so I had to find an alternative. Ultimately I still prefer GrowlMail, but this has a lot of nice features.
http://www.bronsonbeta.com/mailappetizer/
Anyway, great first episode! I look forward to listening to more of them.
Katie & David,
Thanks for another brilliant & interesting Podcast.
We didn’t need another Mac news or rumours show as you said, but your thoughts & ideas of what was missing in the Podcast arena were spot on.
The first show didn’t seem half as long as it actually was as I found it so interesting the time flew by.
So congratulations are in order & I wish you success in the future.
Cheers
Wayne
Did you guys have any thoughts about Thunderbird? The 3.0 betas look really promising.
Excellent information. Thanks for the effort. The best part is the amount of detail, and the differing strategies each of you employ. Not sure you will go this direction, but discussions on professional apps would be great – Final Cut, After Effects, etc..
[...] Mac Power Users Getting the Most from Your Mac « MPU 001: All About E-Mail [...]
Great show. It really gave me good hints at improving my email organization, structure and Spam management.
But, and this is the biggest but, it simply is not working out for me. I configured my three Macs to use IMAP. I moved all the emails from the former Inbox to an “older inbox” folder on my Mac. I made the Action needed mailbox on the IMAP-account. I also set up my Xserve with Mail.app to IMAP all my emails, and run them through Spam Sieve (excellent suggestion). All is well, Spam Sieve is filtering through and moving emails all around.
The problem lies with Mail.app and IMAP. As confirmed by many posts, Mail.app is completely useless towards an IMAP account. It does not syncronize/download messages. It is completely unstable. It will download upon launching the app, and it might download every minute as instructed, but usually not. Nothing happens in the Inbox on either my MacBook Pro or my iMac. On the Xserve G5, it actually works. All machines run 10.5.7, Xserve has the server version.
Any hints to correcting this problem would be appreciated.
Love the shows! You guys are hitting the mark from the start. I get so tired of trying to glean useful info from the other podcasts that is not for the newbie!
Anyway, David seems to be far ahead of me on organization of emails, he seems to have a handle on his email workflow that works well. Would like to hear more about his workflows.
Hello David and Katie,
Enjoy the macpowerusers podcasts.
I re-listened to a section of the email podcast after watching David’s screencast from last year, and heard Katie’s question re replying to an email using more than one email in the iPhone. You need to create a separate account for all your existing emails. They will be listed chronologically below your original .me account. Even though you won’t need to access these accounts because your email is forwarded to your .me email, you will need to keep these accounts active in order to be able to choose an email to reply from. Now, when you reply to an email using your .me from your iPhone, you can click on “from” and it will open a list of all your active accounts to select from. Hope this helps.
I use a similar email process as David, but use “Things” instead of Omnifocus. Each program has it’s goods and bads. I also have few folders, and process most of my emails as tasks using Things and not from my email, unless of course it’s a simple reply.
Take care,
Keith
I just discovered this podcast and wanted to say that you have hit on a legitimate reason for another mac cast. After listening to podcast #1 I decided to take a look at Mail Steward. I believe that you stated that Mail Steward uses a MySQL data base. This is in fact only true for the $99 Pro edition. The $50 standard edition and the $25 Lite edition use SQLite which is probably better suited to a single user application then MySQL.
SpamSieve is great. However, if someone is going to switch to alternative mail programs, it’s possible it won’t be supported. Most notably, Postbox and Thunderbird 3.0 aren’t supported at all. They’ve changed the way Thunderbird does extensions and spam and the author hasn’t been able to get much help from the Thunderbird developers.