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A friend has sent you a link to the following article: http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/1927/ I’m on record taking a two-fold stand. First, email is definitely the internet’s killer application. Second, I hate email. The old sound of You’ve Got Mail was one that elicited excitement and wonder. No more. Too much spam. Too many nonsensical messages. Too much of any kind of good thing can be bad for one’s digital health. However, email is a fact of life. It’s not going away, so it’s better to improve the email process than to die a miserable member of the Email Hater’s Club™, right? What’s Right With Email & Mail Assuming you’ve bit the bullet and use Apple’s Mail, you’re not alone. {embed=“360admanager/content-rectangle-content-A-300x250”}I made the switch a couple of years ago, and Mail is prime time worthy. Of course, it isn’t so much Mail as it is what’s inside. If you’re loaded with spam, please do the world a favor and at least turn on your Junk Mail Filter. That helps to segregate the good from the bad and lessen your need for Excedrin. Me? I’m big on SpamSieve, the Mac’s best spam catcher. But there are other Mac email tools which enhance the overall email experience beyond drab and dreary. Flags & Stars & Scripts, Oh My What else can a Mac user add to our favorite Cupertino-designed digital hubs? DockStar - Add a bunch of badges to Mail’s Dock icon with DockStar so you know how many new messages have arrived, and which email account they belong to (you have more than one email account, yes?). Flagit! - Add multi-colored flags to Mail with Flagit! Any color. Any lavel. As many as you want. It’s handy to color code what’s new, what’s been read, what’s been flagged, what’s been returned, and what’s been completed. Mail Scripts - One of my all time favorites to enhance Mail is the set of free Apple Scripts from Andreas Amann. A few clicks make it easy to archive email, add new addresses, create specific rules, remove duplicate email, and—here it comes—schedule email delivery for when you’re not around. Mail Stationery - Slowly I’m leaving my text-as-email roots and learning to put some sugar on my email messages using Mail’s stationery. Frankly, using Jumsoft’s Mail Stationery could not be easier, and the results speak for themselves. People pay attention to my email now. Text is boring. Eye candy messages are good. Wait! There’s More! Sure, those 5 recommendations (from spam to stationery) are logical extensions of what email should become. What else? {embed=“360admanager/content-rectangle-content-B-300x250”}MailFollowUp is a simple Mail plugin that adds a follow up and a toolbar button to Mail which lets you quote a message and send it to all original recipients. Handy. Mail Saver is a simple archiver which doubles as an organizer for some (but not all) of your email accounts. Simply put, Mail Saver copies messages from Mail to linked folders (you create them by project, person, group, whatever) for safe keeping, including attachments. The List View Finder window lets you view the messages. All these nifty Mail utilities are free or nearly free or we wish they were free but they’re not much so it’s almost like free. Regardless, they’re useful, even indispensable at times, and worthy of any Mac Mail user who’s frustrated at the frustrations caused by too much email. Got a favorite email utility that makes your Mac email life better than before? Share your experience with other Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.