For your Mac: Mail Act-On (it made my day)

I can’t help but blog this wonderful Mail.app plugin. Before Tiger, I was using a modified Applescript originally written by Aaron Swartz. Basically, it let me hit Ctrl-A to move any selected messages to my archived messages mailbox (an IMAP folder in one of my accounts.) Since I save almost every non-spam message I receive, I archive messages about a hundred times a day, and dragging and dropping is a painful way to do it.

Well, the script stopped working in Tiger. And I had to go back to dragging and dropping. And I was miserable. Which is why I was ecstatic to discover Mail Act-On. Not only is it MUCH slicker and more versatile than the method I was using before, but it works in Tiger, and it’s still free. You create all the actions you want as simple Mail.app rules and assign them keystrokes; the plugin handles the rest. Slick OS X bezel fadeouts and all. Move messages to specific folders with a keystroke, give them certain background colors or flag them, even assign multiple actions to the same keystroke with some simple logic to determine which is executed for a given message. Worth a download and a donation. It’ll save you time every single day.

(The picture above is the summary bezel you get when you hit `. It lists all the commands you’ve created and the trigger keys.)

Go get it: Mail Act-On