Well, it’s been alright, but much to my regret the improved latency due to keystrokes only traveling around my local machine — instead of through the interweb and back as was the case with PINE on a remote machine — makes it almost justifiable. Almost.
Apple Mail makes it really easy to delete messages. You just press the “Delete” button. Poof.
Apple Mail, however, makes it a lot more difficult to SAVE messages. You have to go to the “Message” menu, then select “Move To”, then select the mailbox you want to save it in. Or use the mouse to drag-and-drop it into your mailbox of choice. But this is not acceptable as using the mouse depletes one’s indie cred even more than simply using a GUI mail client in the first place.
So, armed with James Eagan’s article on writing mailbundles I wrote a hack which adds a menu item, complete with keyboard shortcut, allowing the user to easily and quickly file one or more messages away in the “Sent” folder (*). See here:
(*) Since switching to Apple Mail — and having access to its nifty and swift full-text search capabilities — I’ve abandoned the thousand-or-so individual folders in which I used to file things away. Mail in my Inbox now goes to one of two destinations: Trash, for spam and automatic notifications and other stuff I have no interest in ever looking at again, or Sent, for anything written by a human and on occasion important things written by computers.
Download MoveMessageToSentFolder-1.0.zip.
Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) only.
To install:
- Copy the mailbundle to
~/Library/Mail/Bundles. Create this folder if it doesn’t already exist. - Open Terminal and run the following commands to enable mailbundle support:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1 defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
Ironically enough, your screenshot shows the built-in way of handling this: the “Move to X Again” item in the menu there. Since you only use two destinations, you’ve got Delete as the shortcut for “Move to Trash”, and after moving one message to “Sent” with the “Move To” submenu, Mail will let you use Cmd+Opt+T to move other messages to Sent. It appears to remember this even after you quit and restart. And if you don’t like the default shortcut key, you can change it in Keyboard Preferences by adding a shortcut for “Move to “Sent” Again”…
By Andrew on 04.21.08 03:46 | Permalink
Andrew -
I was looking for a more robust solution. Since Apple Mail doesn’t provide any visual feedback regarding which mailbox the “Move to x Again” function actually moves the mail to, I’m concerned that I might (for some unusual reason) drop a mail in another folder, then make use of “Move to x Again” and end up unintentionally filing a ton of important messages in some arbitrary folder (which may or may not end up being cached locally and therefore searchable). That just feels too fragile for me.
Plus I was just interested in trying to figure out how to do this. :^)
Steve
By smokris on 04.22.08 06:58 | Permalink