Moving message in Mail.app

I am overwhelmed with many mailboxes from many of my mail accounts. I use to keep each (regular) contact in the separate mailbox, so it's easier for me to find message, when I need them. (I don't need them often though.)

I do have like 5 or 6 regular contacts whom I receiving a lot of messages from (not less then 3-4 from each one daily). Unfortunately, these guys' names are so different, so every time when I'm receiving messages and want to save them, I need to scroll the whole (left-side) list from the top to bottom to find the right person.

I'm getting bothered with that too often now. So, after a quick look around, I found two plugins that can solve my problem. The first one, which looks cooler, is Mail Act-On 2, however, you have to buy it for $24.95 (or you can still get Mail Act-On 1.3.2 for free). The other one is MsgFiler, which is shareware - you can have it for free, but better pay $8 if you find it useful.

So, starting with the MsgFiler (yes, I'm cheapo :). It comes with installer, so you basically don't have to do anything for it. After that, you need to use global keyboard shortcut configure, to setup shortcut for it.


It's pretty easy and described on the site. Make sure you don't misspell Move with MsgFiler (as I did), because you'll not be able to access it then.

Start up Mail.app, select messages, click Command-9 and see the MsgFiler window. You can start typing the name of mailbox, it will react right away and filter the mailboxes by name.


Well, it's easier then to scroll the whole list, but still something could be made better.

Okay, so lets try the other one, which is also free. It also comes with pretty easy installation. But the principle of Mail Act-On is very different. What you do, is to create a rule for every action that you want to have. Like I did, for messages from my brother, linked to o.

That was the first thing that I didn't find very comfortable. Actually, it is comfortable for some cases, but pretty limited in other.


Everything else looks pretty easy though. And much more fancy than MsgFiler.

After spending half an hour with each one, I decided to stick with MsgFiler as for now. It gives me better flexibility, as I don't want to assign a lot of contacts to the key. I know that I'll end up with map of 10 or 15 keys, and it's going to become one more big list to scroll through. I'll miss the fancy look though. ;)

Quick update: As it works out, MsgFiler starts to complain about being unregistered after the 5th message. While $8 is not a lot, I find it to be annoying. I am happy to pay for software, but 5 messages isn't enough for me to find out do I really like it and want it. It'd take a week or even more to finally settle up. (Sorry that I am so slow.) So I'm turning into Mail Act-On back.

Dashboard widgets

I'm giving a quick look at the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. I knew that they're pretty much HTML + CSS + JavaScript piece of code, with some features on the top, but never worked with them before.

However, even while the world goes into cloud, I like the dashboard widgets and found them to be pretty useful for many types of tasks. Anyway, until the computer is not the browser (it might be so, someday, though), there is a market for desktop software.

As it comes out, you can start doing them pretty easy by using Dashcode. It's still in beta, but gave me a pretty solid impression and made them process very clear for me.

Literally, it takes only few steps to produce sample widget. More then that, you can also test it right within the Dashcode environment. I was prepared for overriding the dashboard into debug mode and placing widgets on the desktop for further development, but using Dashcode makes it much easier. (I'm still going to place some widgets on the Desktop anyway.)

The only thing that Dashcode doesn't make very easy, is how to get the link to the actual widget package. I found it to reside within the project's folder, but it looks like this is something I could just click and get from the menu bar.

Now I'm going to keep the designers and developers busy with nice picture and functionality, so I can continue playing with the widget.