Rethinking Email – Inbox Serenity (MacSparky Labs)

I’m behind on my email, which made me rethink my email practices and how I can improve them. This is no less than my quest for email serenity. I’ve decided to do this as a series for the MacSparky Labs. Here’s the first entry talking about the problem, potential solutions, and some trouble areas where a specific email can gum up the works. I also share diagrams of some of my email workflows…

This is a post for MacSparky Labs Level 3 (Early Access) and Level 2 (Backstage) Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Will MailKit Save Mail.app?

One of the announcements to come out of WWDC this year is a new framework for third parties to create plugins for Apple’s Mail.app called MailKit. Mail.app has been stagnant for a long time. While the app continues to get support for email rendering…

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Hey Email Gets Multi-Account Support and Hey for Work Released

The Hey team has been hard at work with several updates for Hey Email released today: 1. HEY for Work is now released. I’ve been trying it with one of my accounts and I’m impressed with its collaboration tools. Thread sharing with people on…

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The Calm Email Course

Today Shawn Blanc and team Sweet Setup released the Calm Inbox course. I’ve watched it, and it is excellent. One point of note, Focused Podcast co-host Mike Schmitz played a significant role in developing this course, and Mike is one of the most thoughtful…

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AppleScript to Link to Apple Mail Message

I’ve always like the way OmniFocus can create links to Apple Mail messages when saving an email as a task. With help from listener Jacob (@evansio), I’ve now got a script that can do that anywhere via a text expander snippet. Here’s the AppleScript:…

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A Case Study in Phishing

A few days ago I received this email. I thought it was an excellent example of a phishing attack. If you’ve never heard of it before, phishing is a process where a bad guy sends you an email that looks legitimate in hopes that…

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The Email Diet

With the start of a new year, I’m looking at new workflows, this year even more than usual. I’m disappointed that my latest iBook didn’t get released last year and am now looking for ways to get rid of some of the obstacles that got…

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The Perils of Your Own Mail Servers

I was at a professional gathering recently when the subject of email security came up. I was surrounded by a group of lawyers that knew next-to-nothing about technology and it made me curious about their thoughts on email servers. Going around the room, I…

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Screencast and Workflow for Automating PDFs on iPhone and iPad

I mentioned on a recent episode of Mac Power Users how much I like the workflow I created for automatically creating, dating, naming, and saving PDF files from third party iOS mail clients. Here is is. You can create this workflow yourself from the…

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Killing the Email Action Folder

For years now I’ve kept an “action” folder with all of my email accounts. This was particularly useful before I started deferring email with services like SaneBox. However, as of late, the “action” folder has turned into some sort of email purgatory for me.…

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