How To Trick Out, Pimp Up, Customize Mac Mail.

Mail. You can’t live with it. You can’t live without it. It’s like my wife. Except I can customize Mail; make it better, improve the utility, and the beauty.

Here’s my stack of custom utilities that trick out and pimp up my Mail, my way.

Your Mac is a personal computer, right? You deserve a Mail application that’s personal for you.

Tops on my list is the free Mail Scripts by Andreas Amann. If you use Mail, use Mail Scripts.

Mature and stable, Mail Scripts is a handy collection of AppleScript utilities for Mail and AddressBook that offer bonus features and simplifes your efforts.

For example, Mail Scripts lets you move Mail messages from a specific mailbox to an archive mailbox. You can also export messages to a standard mbox format for backup.

I travel regularly and always have to switch my SMTP server (Earthlink, be gone!). Mail Scripts makes it easy to switch.

One of my favorites is Remove Duplicates. This script searches a mailbox, finds duplicates, and sends them to another mailbox (so you can check before dumping).

My most favorite script is Schedule Mail. It’s handy for sending mail later without having to be around later (uses iCal for scheduling).

Carol and I often bounce a group of email addresses back and forth to each other, and Mail Scripts makes it easy with Export Addresses.

Not bad for free.

Pimping your Mail never looked better than DockStar.

It’s remarkable that something so simple and elegant could be so useful. I deal with multiple email accounts so there’s always the need to check Mail to find out who sent what to which account.

DockStar modifies the new-mail indicators for Mail in the Dock. You can see how many new messages have arrived for up to five different email accounts.

Just try it. This is remarkably handy. Colorful, too. It’s set it and forget it. Glance at your Mail numbers in the Dock.

Are you serious about Mail and email? Do you have thousands of messages on your Mac? I’ve been using Mail for nearly five years, with multiple accounts, and I’ve got plenty of mail to manage.

After awhile, there was too much mail to sort through, even with Spotlight, so I tried MailSteward. This is a nice addition as it stores old mail in a database, but doesn’t modify the messages inside Mail.

Written in Cocoa and ready for Intel Macs, MailSteward has a healthy list of features, imports and exports messages, and does a search of a large volume of mail messages that makes Spotlight look like the snail in Apple’s old Pentium TV commercial.

Those utilities will make using Mail more enjoyable, and keep you productive, even if you’re storing thousands and thousands of messagaes.

What about the next level? Mailings is what you use when you need to send batch email, HTML or plain text, including attachments.

Between Mail and full-fledged email marketing software, Mailings rules. Think of it as the bulk mail button for Mail and AddressBook.

Mailings is rather simple to use but goes far beyond just sending out a bunch of email. Logging, progress monitoring, personalization, and more.

Finally, no Mac OS X user who travels and deals in email should be without Postfix Enabler. Postfix is a powerful mail application that’s built in to Mac OS X. You just have to turn it on.

That’s what Postfix enabler does. Instead of buying the two inch thick book on Postfix, Postfix Enabler lets your Mac become an SMTP and POP and IMAP mail server, including secure SSL if you need it.

This is the application to use if you want to make a Mac mini into an email server, but it’s good for PowerBook’s too, as you can use your Mac to send mail without having to connect to a remote mail server first.

Mail can be bland or productive. Boring or tricked out and pimped up. Just add the right pizzaz.

The Pony Express mail delivery method may have been exciting, but not timely compared to email.

Today’s email is only as boring as we let it. What do you use to spice up Apple’s Mail?