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Plug-Ins I use for Mail.app

Attention Mac Users that use Mail.app, this one is for you.

Mail.app has a bunch of plugins that are available to it, not like Thunderbird, where Mozilla holds a repository of Plugins, Apple doesn’t do that. But there are a ton of them available on the Internet and it would be great if Apple would do something like that (like they are about to do with html5 extensions for Safari). Mail calls these plugins “Bundles” and are found in the ~/Library/Mail/Bundles directory. I just wanted to write a post about a few of the Bundles that I use with Mail.app to make my email a lot easier to use.

1. Mail Act-On

Mail Act-On, written by indev software, the same people who provide MiniMail and Mail Tags (two other great bundles that I don’t use), is an Email organization tool. Basically it allows you to tie Mail.app rules to keystrokes. So for example, one of the Keystrokes that I use is “`1″ (Backtick, 1). The rule I have tied to that command is to move whatever the current email I have highlighted to a certain folder. What I do is have most of the email that I deal with from listservers go directly to folders (on the server), and then the Mails from certain webservers and other “To Me” email goes to my Inbox. Since I use the Inbox Zero method of filtering email, I can read an email, and if I want to file it away, I use the keystroke to move it to my Archive folder. Simple, done. I can color emails certain colors, I can move emails around, etc. It’s nice, and I suggest it’s use.

2. Widemail

Widemail is a bundle that displays your email in the three column format. Similar to how the newer versions of Outlook and Entourage display your email, I find this method of email is easier to read (from left to right) as opposed to the old Outlook method of from the “Top Down“. It also allows you to color code rows two different colors so it’s easy to spot where your cursor is at.

3. QuoteFix

Quotefixformac is like Outlook Quotefix. It reformats emails for bottom posting, cleans up the cruft, removes the signature from the original message, cleans up unnecessary lines, and even prune replies above a certain indentation. It’s a nice tool and I use it to format emails the way I like them as well.

So, just three plugins I use for Mail.app, check them out, give them a shot, support the developers that made them.

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Categories: Mail, apple.

By Joel
— July 13, 2010 at 17:49

Mailing lists do not get Anti-Spam

Note: If you are subscribed to a Mailing List, and you have one of those “Auto-answer-back-auto-emailing-verify-that-you-are-a-human-by-clicking-on-this-link-really annoying-things”. You are doing it wrong.

Get a frickin Gmail account people.

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Categories: fail, funny.

By Joel
— July 13, 2010 at 13:51

Some new pictures of the Mustang

Went up to the shop that is restoring my car today and took a few photos.  For all the photos, go here, but here are some I took today.

Back Camera
Back Camera
Back Camera


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Categories: Mustang, car, picture, pictures.

By Joel
— July 2, 2010 at 15:52

PulledPork 0.4.2 501 error when downloading rules

Security – The Global Perspective: PulledPork 0.4.2 501 error when downloading rules.

JJ, buddy, and fellow Sourcefire pimp wrote this blog post about errors that people are getting when trying to run PulledPork and it’s not working when downloading rules under the new format when using Ubuntu.

Go read his post.

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Categories: Sourcefire, security, software.

By Joel
— July 1, 2010 at 13:15

Live CD for Remote Incident Handling

This paper was written by Bert Hayes. Bert Hayes is a security professional at the University of Texas. When Bert originally wrote this paper, he submitted it to me for the SANS Gold process, and I helped push the paper in the right direction, however, while it was an excellent paper and well written, it didn’t really meet the criteria we were looking for.

However, I thought “Wow, what a great idea, what a great paper. I am sure a lot of organizations will benefit from this.”

Of course Bert nor I can be held liable for any damage you to do a computer while using this, (just to get that disclaimer out of the way), and it’s recommended that if you are going to use the contents of the computer you are doing the investigation on for a prosecution, don’t use this. (Changing the state of the data on the drive during a forensic investigation is generally frowned upon.)

But, as I said, this is a great paper and you should definitely download it and give it a read.

  • http://security.utexas.edu/consensus/How_To_UTIRD2.pdf

Enjoy

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Categories: Uncategorized, sans.

By Joel
— June 25, 2010 at 12:52

I had to submit a bug report

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Categories: apple, browser.

By Joel
— June 24, 2010 at 09:13

The Google Command Line Tool

Enough of the readers of this blog can be classified as “Command Line Nerds”, myself included, and this post is aimed at you.

Apparently they don’t have enough to do at Google, so they sit around and make tools to collect your wifi data, read your email and give you ads for them, and various other nifty Google ideas.  (Yes, I still love Google.)

But apparently they had enough time to make a tool to interact with Google via the command line.  Using Python you can do a whole mess of things..

  • You can Post to Blogger!

google blogger post –title “Just like this” “This is my blog entry, there are many like it but this one is mine”

  • You can Post to your Google Calendar!

google calendar add “Take out garbage at 7 pm on Tuesday”

  • You can perform various tasks with your Contacts!

google contacts list name,email –name *joel* > joel.csv

  • You can edit some Google docs!

google docs edit –title “Document title here”

  • You can upload photos to Picasa easily!

google picasa create –album “Photos of my car” ~/Pictures/Mustang/*.jpg

  • You can even upload videos to Youtube!

google youtube post –category Entertainment video.mov

They have a package available for debian (ubuntu) and they have a tar.gz bundle as well.  So happy computing, check it out here.

But You Know, this might be nifty for uploading pictures to picasa, or scripting it to upload many things to docs, or youtube.  But you know the one thing you can’t do with your google command line?

Search Google.

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Categories: Google, funny.

By Joel
— June 18, 2010 at 20:32

Apple updates Anti-Malware file

Last year in August I wrote a post called “Snow Leopard is coming…” where I mentioned the XProtect.plist file.  This file protects and defends the OSX system against “downloader” trojans.  Ones that you receive via iChat, or download via Safari, Mail.. basically if you download the trojan to your system.

In the most recent update of Snow Leopard that came out last week (10.6.4), that I didn’t cover, it seems Apple has updated the XProtect.plist file to include a new trojan named “HellRTS”.

I guess this answers my original question, if they are going to keep it updated, am I am glad they are, however, I’d like to see them update it even more often than that, and of course include more things.  It’s better than nothing, I suppose..  but I’d like to see more.

As of right now, there are a whole three trojans protected against in the XProtect file.

  • OSX.RSPlug.A
  • OSX.Iservice
  • OSX.HellRTS

You can find this file in the:

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/

directory.

This article by Sophos turned me onto the update, but I reposted without the conspiracy theories:

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/06/18/apple-secretly-updates

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Categories: apple, malware, osx, security, software.

By Joel
— June 18, 2010 at 12:51

Find My iPhone App Now Available

Along with rolling out some nice GUI improvements to MobileMe (yes, I use it.  It’s simple, it works, and I don’t have to mess with it.) last night for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, etc.  Apple also released a “Find my iPhone app” available from the App Store.

In the past, if you lost your iPhone, you couldn’t log into MobileMe from your buddy’s phone (or iPad) and find your phone.  Now, with this app, you can do that.

Grab the app: here.

Apple – MobileMe – News – Find My iPhone App Now Available.

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Categories: apple.

By Joel
— June 18, 2010 at 11:07

Black Background in Mail.app

I’ve noticed that for some reason, after you install Safari 5 on OSX, if you are to do a command where it creates an email out of a file.  For instance:

Open a PDF in Preview and you want to email that to someone else, you go to File, and click “Email this PDF” (or similar)  It’ll create a new email message, but the background of the mail message will be black.

I’ve noticed this in Omnifocus as well, if I use a shortcut key to create a “To-Do” from another application by using the “Clipping” function, the background of the “To-Do” will be black.

Well, at least in Mail there is a fix.

If you want to keep the email HTML, Command -A will select the contents of the email, Cut it (not copy it), (command x), then repaste it with Option-Shift-Command-V  (Paste and Match Style — this is in the Edit menu).  Or…  You can change the email to Plain Text (which will get rid of the black box), Plain Text is in the Format menu.  Or Command Shift T.

Plain Text is usually better anyway.

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Categories: Mail, apple, browser, updates.

By Joel
— June 17, 2010 at 10:44