Switching to a Mac, Part 3: Mail & iCal
In my original switching to a Mac post, I was leaning more towards Entourage. And I own it. It’s sitting here, in its box, with the rest of the Office suite, waiting to be installed. I’m trying to avoid the temptation and force myself to use iWork, iCal, and Mail.app. It’s hard. I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products. But it’s time to break old habits.
Moving Messages from the PC
On Monday I downloaded Outlook2Mail (O2M) for the PC. This app easily converts your Outlook contacts, calendar, and email messages/files/folders to iCal/Mail formats. That part was easy. They easily slid in to their new homes on the Mac. I ran into some trouble syncing with my iPhone, but that’s tomorrow’s post.
IMAP v POP
I set up my 6 (yes 6) different email accounts and made them all IMAP. This makes it so much easier for me because I also check mail from my phone. Now I won’t be seeing messages twice. Several of my accounts, such as my wine-girl.net account, are run through Google Apps for Your Domain – in essence, Gmail. This is great because it then employs the GMail spam filter. I thought this would be a good time to bring all my accounts into one Inbox, so that I don’t have to check different webmail accounts plus my regular email.
My choice to go 100% IMAP affects a lot of what I’m about to tell you. I have to deal with a lot of separate calendars, mailboxes, todo lists, etc, that I bet you don’t get when you use strictly POP. Keep that in mind.
Mail is strange. It shows each IMAP mailbox separately. I figured out that if you flip the triangle and collapse them, you can view all of your messages in one single Inbox, but still have access to the separate inboxes if you choose. I ignore everything but my main Inbox.
Rules
The next thing I did was set up rules to color code my mail. Mail that
comes to the writetech.net account is blue, mail that comes to the
wine-girl.net account is purple, and so on. I actually couldn’t do this
in Outlook, so I was thrilled that I could in Mail.
iCal
iCal and I get along okay. I color coded my calendar similar to my
email. In iCal, instead of labels or categories, you have separate
calendars. I don’t really care for this though. In the view menu, I hid
the calendar list. Now I can just see the main calendar and my ToDo
list panel. Much better. This is similar to collapsing the IMAP inboxes in Mail.
Tasks / ToDos
I spent most of Monday trying to figure out how to make a task out of a
mail message. Hours, people. I did this for hours. I’m an idiot. In
Outlook 2007, I can easily select a message and right click, turning it
into a task or a calendar event. I honestly can’t tell you if this is
native to Outlook or the result of one of my plug-ins, I’ve used it for
so long. I could not make this happen in Mail. I kept reading that it
was possible, but my little todo icon remained grayed out.
Finally, I found a blog post somewhere that enlightened me. You have to
select a line of text within the message, THEN it easily becomes a
task. I don’t know if this particular issue happens if you’re not using
IMAP. It may be easier to create a task out of a POP message. It’s
worth mentioning that the Apple Help is not very helpful on this
topic.
When you create a task (todo, as Apple calls them), a little yellow
lined sheet appears at the top of your mail message and you can edit
the task. I add due dates, alter the text, and so on. In Mail, ToDos
appear quite helpfully in a column on your iCal, so when you look at
iCal, you can see all your ToDos. ToDos also appear in a folder in
Mail. Again, with IMAP, you need to collapse the various ToDo boxes (one for each account), to view them all in one main ToDo box. I’m not thrilled with having to seek out my ToDos though. I like them in front of me, reminding me I need to do them.
My biggest issue remaining that I haven’t fixed is the inabillity to create recurring tasks.
How I Fixed Mail
Well, I didn’t fix it. But I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins. One word of warning with these – you need to make sure they work for Leopard before you install them.
The best place I found for Mail.apps, although not recently updated, was HawkWings. Again, make sure your favorite apps have been updated to work with 10.5 Leopard.
Here’s what I installed:
MailTags: This makes creating ToDos incredibly easy. It does what I need, which is make a ToDo OR a calendar event out of any mail message. I don’t need to select specific text or anything silly. It also lets me assign priorities, calendars, and color codes if I so choose, as well as additional notes. Plus, it retains the link to the original email. I can also tag the todos so that they are easily found in Spotlight. This costs $30 from inDev software but I’m pretty sure that for me, it’s worth every penny. InDev also has Mail ActOn, which people seem to love, but I use MsgFiler. Mail ActOn does more than MsgFiler, but I don’t need the extra functionality just yet.
MsgFiler: This does for me what SimplyFile does for me in Outlook. I can, with one or two keystrokes, easily file away my mail messages in the appropriate folders. It’s time saving and wonderful. It’s shareware at $8, but again, it’s worth it. I hate having tons of mail sitting in my inbox.
MailAppetizer: When Outlook wasn’t active, a little transparent box would pop up and let me know information about the new email. I loved this, as it let me gauge whether or not to stop what I was doing and deal with the email or if it could be tabled for later. Mail doesn’t do this. It just beeps at you and ups the Inbox number in the dock. MailAppetizer gives me that transparent box. I already love this little add-on a lot.
MenuCalendarClock: This replaces the useful calendar/task bar that appeared to the right of my mail messages in Outlook. I’d really come to rely on being able to see my mini calendar and plans for the day, along with my tasks, when I was working in Outlook. This plug in works with iCal, but you access it, whenever you need it, from your main menu bar in Finder. I have this little gadget open all the time. It’s shareware at $20, which I think is priced too high, but I love what it does, so I’ll pay for it.
I also tried Letterbox, which gives you a widescreen, 3-column format with the reading pane to the right. I wasn’t comfortable with it though, so I went back to the default.
SmartFolders
The other way I made Mail.app a more productive tool was to use SmartFolders. If you’ve ever used Smart Playlists in iTunes, then you understand SmartFolders.
Example:
I made a Smart Folder for the local ASTD group for which I’m involved. Any email that comes or goes with gcastd.org in it, or from one of the folks in the ASTD group in my address book, gets automatically filed in the ASTD Smart Folder. Now, it’s also in my Inbox, or wherever I may file it later (using MsgFiler), but I can easily check every single, even unfiled, message for ASTD right in the Smart Folder.
This is fantastic. I made several of these and will probably also make them for specific projects and/or clients. Heck, in the end, I may switch to all smart folders and eventually do away with my other folders entirely. But we’ll get there slowly.
So there you go. I’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.
Related Posts:
Switching to a Mac, Part 1
Switching to a Mac Part 2: Parallels
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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.
jay
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm #
What blog did you find this info? I have my mail set up as IMAP and I cannot use the Todos at all. There isn’t a corresponding calendar for the IMAP mailbox. If you can help I would appreciate it.
Michelle Lentz
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 pm #
Jay:
As mentioned above, I found all many of the plug-ins via HawkWings, as well as just googling what I needed.
I don’t use calendars the way you are – for instance, I don’t want a corresponding calendar for a mail account. My calendar is set up via topic (work, social, theatre, etc). I use MailTags to create my To Do, which shows up in whichever topic calendar (work, theatre, etc) I choose.
I highly recommend searching for plug-ins. Mail is useful for me only because it’s extensible.