On my italian blog one of the post which, over the time, is receiving more hits via search engines is the one about how to migrate your e-mails Microsoft Outlook to Mail.app (alias the default one included in the Mac OS X package).

Generally speaking I am seeing many “switchers” tryng the Outlook –> Entourage transition, probably because they believe the look and feel of the application will be the same. Unfortunately - for them - that isn’t the case. Also, the Entourage in Office:mac 20004 edition has proven to be one of the most problematic and crashing piece of software I had the chance to run in my first generation MacBook.

So, how to behave when you’re uncomfortable with Entourage and want to move to some other e-mail client?

Banally the answer comes from this tip from MacOSXhints.

Click on the Folder list in the left-hand pane and drop it onto your desktop; this will export the folder in the popular mbox format.

Real simple and indeed really “apple style” in the use of the drag & drop paradigm, isnt’ that so ?

{All of this post because if you try the export function in Entourage you will end up with a “closed source” and “proprietary” file cointaining your e-mails.}

Getting back into blogging today I would like to tell you about a script that aims to improve the e-mail label management of Apple’s built in e-mail client Mail.app.

On the far away july 2006 I had the possibility to follow an advanced course of Mac OS X in the classrooms of the Politecnico di Bari realized by the Campus Satellitare del Salento with the participations of the professor Franco Tommasi (link) and his staff, which counted my pal Paolo Portaluri.

Paolo {*}, in those last two years has become on of my top 2 Apple consultant, proving to be reliable, precise, always insightful and helping a lot!

At the time, howerever, our friendship was borning and I think one of the seeds was my question to him on how to have colored labels in Mail.app.

Since the beginning of my use of e-mail clients I had become used, thanks to Eudora first and Thunderbird now, to label with a name and a color some of e-mails present in my mailboxes.

Red for “important” e-mail, blue for the “link” containing one, green for e-mail containing addresses, purple for “humor” messages. You got the idea, I hope!

So Paolo told me that the application itself wasn’t giving me any option in that direction but that probably, using a simple AppleScript, he could give me a solution to the problem.

And so he did! And later on published the code in this post on the Apple’s themed TEVAC forum. One of the biggest italian resources on Cupertino’s stuff.

So what follows now is a traslation of the procedure and a modding of the script to my liking!

First you have to launch the Script Editor given with each copy of OS X.

The Script Editor application, located in /Applications/AppleScript, is a useful tool for working with Apple events. If your application is scriptable, you can use Script Editor to write and execute scripts that target your application, resulting in Apple events being sent to the application.

You will copy the following AppleScript and save it on your desktop with a name, personally I’ve used the labeler-mailapp.scpt name.

Here’s the code:
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages selectedMsgs
— let’s choose the colors
set chosenColor to item 1 of (choose from list {”Link”, “Gray”, “Address”, “Interesting”, “Humor”, “Important”, “Yellow”, “None”})
if chosenColor is equal to “Link” then
set color to blue
else if chosenColor is equal to “Gray” then
set color to gray
else if chosenColor is equal to “Address” then
set color to green
else if chosenColor is equal to “Interesting” then
set color to orange
else if chosenColor is equal to “Humor” then
set color to purple
else if chosenColor is equal to “Important” then
set color to red
else if chosenColor is equal to “Yellow” then
set color to yellow
else if chosenColor is equal to “None” then
set color to none
end if
tell application “Mail”
set selCount to (count of selectedMsgs)
if selCount is equal to 0 then
display dialog “NO SELECTED MESSAGE!” buttons {”OK”} default button 1 with icon stop
else
repeat with counter from 1 to selCount
set msg to item counter of selectedMsgs
— apply the color
set background color of msg to color
end repeat
end if
end tell
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
– If run as an ordinary script, instead of directly from the Scripts
– menu, it will call the default handler instead.
using terms from application “Mail”
on run
tell application “Mail” to set sel to selection
tell me to perform mail action with messages (sel)
end run
end using terms from


Saved? All OK?

Now let’s copy the scpt file into the ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/ directory (even if I now have it placed and working into ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail Scripts).

Two more steps to go!

We have to lauch the Applescript Utility on your Mac and enable the “Script menu in to the menu bar“, this will show you a “paper” into the menu bar … please forgive the bad translation but I hope that the image here will show you what I mean.

Now we launch Mail.app, select the particular e-mail we want to label, click on the “paper” above and choose the voice “labeler-mailapp” and we’ll have a new window from where to choose the label/color intended.

That’s it!

Now a curiosity, if you reinstall your Mac and do not reinstall the script your e-mails will store the previously given color.

Cheers!

–
{*} yes, Paolo is poweruser82 that with his more than 22.000 posts on the Tevac’s forum is an envaluable resouces to us!

In the last couple of days I’ve been busy setting up an FTP server upon with a number of people could browse a group of directory and their files.

To achieve this I gave trust to pureftpd using a virtual users configurations, since my users won’t need a shell on the machine, following a clear howto found on the web regarding an Ubuntu server configuration.

Clearly to my superior a “plain” access via a normal ftp client (filezilla, cyberduck, name the one) wasn’t enough. He wanted the possibility to browse those files and directory also via the nowadays ever present web browser.

Authenticating the users. Which aren’t system users, or Apache’s defined one. They are from the pureFTPd daemon, and also virtual!!

So I had to throw away the use of an .htaccess writted ad-hoc and I begun the search of a premade script that, accepting the couple of parameters username and password inputed from a simple web form would do a parsing and give an URL to my browser in the syntax of the classic ftp://username:password@ftp-host.

Thanks to my pal Nicola D’Agostino I found a specific javascript that have proved to be THE solution I was searching: THIS.

So, if you’ll ever need this, now you know where to search!

To who, like me, has migrated his e-mail preferred client from Qualcomm’s Eudora to the more recent Mozilla Thunderbird sometimes gets a remembering of a pair of useful and pretty basic features not provided anywhere else (AFAIK).

In this post particularly I’m referring to the ability to divide the e-mail content from its attachment or embedded content (in case of the awful HTML e-mailing practice) in two comfortable and easily browsable directory in the Eudora profile folder: attachments (and embedded).

Also the attachments are stored in their native file format, making even easier the indexing and searching process by the growing number of utility of that kind that today lives in our operating systems.

Personally I’ve had more success, and more quickly, finding that particular PDF or PPS attached in an e-mail from a friend or a colleague searching in those folders instead of opening the email client and then making a search. {And I’ll say nothing more about the PITA that is searching a specific email if you have like 20 accounts on the Thunderbird client.}

Well, last friday, moved by a specific question by a colleague who has decided to move from Eudora after many and many years of use I’ve searched for a specific addon into the Mozilla plugins directory and I found two promising results.

The one that has gotten my main attention was Attachment Extractor positively rated and with a reasonable high number of downloads. Here’s what is supposed to achieve:

Extracts all attachments from selected messages and then can delete, detach or mark-read.

So I’ve downloaded and installed it on my machine, choosing the automatic extraction of the attachments directly during the POP fetching phase, pointing them into an easily browsable directory as /Users/nicola/Documents/Thunder-Mail/attachments (on Mac OS X, does it needs more explaination ?).

After four days of use I can say it works smoothly without being heavy on the program’s speed. The only “weak” spot - for the moment - is a quick appearing/disappearing pop-up informing the user aboout the status of the extraction phase that isn’t integrated in the status bar of the program …. but maybe this is doable and the only thing I have to do is to re-look carefully at the addon option page.

Cheers,
kOoLiNuS