Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Stuff I Use: Mail Appetizer



As a compulsive email checker, I tend to have my email client open at all times.  Each time it chimes with new mail, I switch over to Apple Mail.app to read whatever I've just received.  Unfortunately, half the time the chime ends up being junk mail and I've just stopped whatever I was in the middle of and interrupted my train of thought just to figure that out.  The solution for this should be for me to just turn off Mail.app aside from when I'm specifically checking email, but I wanted something more convenient that still fueled my email addiction.  I wanted something that would instantly display a small preview of the sender, subject, and content of an email as an "on top" message window.  Mail.appetizer is an Mail.app plug-in that does exactly that.  The plug-in creates an instant preview of incoming mail after rules (such as the junk mail filter) have been applied.  This allows me to ignore spam messages entirely and at the same time fits into my workflow allowing me to see new mail without having to switch from what I'm doing every ten minutes.  Regardless of the application I'm in, I'm presented with new mail and given the options to ignore the message for now, mark it as read, or delete it on the spot - all without switching to Mail.app.

This was one of the primary plug-ins that I'd been missing since my switch to Mac OS X 10.5, but a recent upgrade by the developers has enabled Leopard use and my productivity has increased as a result.  If you use Apple Mail, give it a try!

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