Create a mailbox using the Mail app preference panel (e.g. Jan 2001), drag all your mail you want to archive for that month into the mailbox. Quit Mail and go to your home library and find the Mail folder, open it and remove your newly created mailbox containing all your archived mail. I would then store this on a removable disc if my CD RW was recognized. For now I just store it on the hard drive of another Mac on my LAN.

If you want to copy a audio track from a CD, you don't have to bother with importing it via QuickTime player or Toast Audio Extractor anymore. Just put the CD in and when you open it in the Finder, the files on there are in native .aiff format ready for you to just copy them straight onto your hard drive.

Cool!

Stuart

TextEdit is a WYSIWYG editor. If you open up an HTML file, and you don't just see HTML tags, but you actually see the web document.

You can shut this off by specifying in the preferences to turn rich text encoding on or off for HTML files.

Sorta a neat feature, I wish the turn off rich text was a menu command as opposed to a preference.

I wanted to edit the index.html file that sits in the ~/Sites folder. If you double-click this file, Explorer opens. So I picked it up and dropped it on my jEdit icon in DragThing. Poof - the file vanished! jEdit is a Java-based text editor, not some kind of auto-deleter, so it looked like there was a bit of a problem. A quick look showed it wasn't in the trash, and I couldn't use Sherlock to find the file, since I have about 2,500 index.html's on my machine ... so it had basically vanished into thin air.

As an experiment, I duplicated a text document, renamed it to "XXXYYYZZZ" and dropped that onto jEdit. Same results - poof, file's gone. But this time I launched Sherlock, and searched for the file. No sign of it on any disk. So once more, I went back to the finder, duplicated a text file, and named it the same thing as before. Dragged it onto jEdit, but this time, I got a message about there already being a file with that name in the location, and did I want to rename the file?

This was the enlightenment I needed. I went to the finder, right-clicked on the jEdit app, and chose Show Package Contents. There, sitting inside the jEdit application bundle, were all my test files, and the missing index.html file! Somehow, dragging and dropping the document on jEdit moved it into the app bundle, instead of launching jEdit.

I tested this with a couple other apps, and couldn't repeat the behavior. But I can repeat it consistently with jEdit. So if you use DragThing, and you seem to have dropped a file and had it vanish, check the bundle for the application you dropped it onto -- it may very well be there!

One of the best new features in OS X is the ability to batch-convert application links for various documents. Before finding this, I had inadvertently started up Classic simply by clicking on a .jpg file that could have been viewed in Preview instead. To make the files open a different application, shift-click to select as many of the same document type as you want (for example, 100 .jpg files), then choose Show Info from the File menu in the Finder. Select Application in the pop-up menu and you will be able to select any application you wish to open the files. Once you've made your choice, the batch-conversion is nearly instantaneous.

Elobornola

If you hold down the Command key, you can move around toolbar items without opening customize. You can add folders by dragging, of course. Saves a lot of time!

Read this @ MacNN forums; originally posted by porfiry.

Open TextEdit, create a new document, and then drag in an application ("Clock", for example) from the Finder. You'll see a clock icon appear in your document. If you save the document, it will be in "rtfd" format, which the Finder tells me is "RTF with attachments." If you look at the size of the file, you'll see that, in fact, the entire app has been saved with the document! Now open the file you just saved. Double-click on the application icon (the clock, in this example). The application launches right from TextEdit!

I have no idea as to how this might be useful; maybe it's a standard data format (but I've never heard of embedding an application in an RTF document?). There's nothing in Apple's help about this 'feature', so this is about all I know. Anyone care to shed any more light on the subject?

If you ever want to send email through one POP account, but with different sender info, there's a trick to doing so with mail.app. An example of this would be Yahoo! services, which allow one to have several public "personalities", each of which dump email to just one yahoo.com email address. In order to respond as the proper personality, you need to pick a different "from" address, even though you have only one POP account.

In mail.app, in the Account edit screen, you can enter multiple email addresses on the 'Email Address:' line. Separate each with a comma, and then save your changes. When you compose a new email from that account, you'll see a little pop-up for selecting which address you would like to use as the sender of the email. Very slick trick, and easier than creating an entirely new account.

You can't change the physical name, though - only the email address. If you need a different physical name, you'll have to set up different accounts.

Apple's mail.app stores most of the text strings it uses for creating replies, displaying dialogs, and composing new messages in an easy-to-edit text file. If you haven't relocated your mail.app, you can find the text file here:

/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Compose.strings

When I tried to edit this in the terminal, all I got was gibberish - it's a Unicode text file. Opening and saving it in the GUI works fine; you just have to use a control-click on mail.app to "Show Package Contents" in a new Finder window, and specify which application to open it with (I used TextEdit).

Amazingly enough, the text file is even commented, explaining what each line does. You'll have to do some work to change the default reply string ("On March 23, robg wrote..."), as the date format strings are all variables - I imagine they match those used by the system date command, which you can view in the man pages:

man strftime

Have fun customizing, but you should probably make a backup copy of the unmodified file first -- just in case! Any changes made take effect on the next launch of mail.app.

This tip was posted to the X4U mailing list by a member of Apple's mail team.

Panther update: As noted in the comment below, you now need to edit /System -> Library -> Framework -> Message.framework -> Resources -> English.lproj -> Message.strings. In addition, you'll have to reboot after making the change to see it take effect.

To synchronise my Visor, I add "Serial Port Monitor" to my start-up items. It can be found inside the Palm folder of the Palm desk-top software. This automatically starts Classic.

An icon is left in the dock with the Hotsync logo. This is normally a faceless background application under OS 9- and does nothing when clicked. However, when the Hotsync button on the cradle is pressed, it will happily sync your Visor.

I have found that it's best not to put the Hotsync Manager in the background during the synchronisation process as it can sometimes hang the Classic environment.

Cheers,
Jason.