After installing Leopard on my main machine, nearly everything seems to be working fine, except for one essential application, Mail Act-On. It’s disabled by Leopard when Mail is launched. Back in the OS 9 days I used Eudora, and it had an option (command-J I believe) to run rules on the selected messages. Rules themselves could be specified to run on incoming messages, outgoing messages, or when activated with the shortcut or menu option.

Since Mail.app doesn’t have similar options for rules (the only option is to have the rules act on incoming messages), I use Mail Act-On to achieve a similar result. I set up all of my Act-On rules to respond to the same keystroke ( ` then 1 ), which files the selected messages away into their respective folders. I suppose I could make the move to using one giant archive folder and use smart folders to generate the folders I need, but I’ve been using my current system for years now, and with my rules set up, using a keystroke to move messages to a specific folder is just as easy and time efficient for me.

Anyway, my point is that Mail Act-On has become essential to my workflow, even if I’m not using it quite the way it was intended. Luckily, the developer seems to be on top of things.

From the forums on Indev.ca, “smorr” says:

MAO is basically good to go but one needs to install MAO open terminal and type
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

This seems to be working great for me so far. He also mentions that he expects to release a fully Leopard-compatible release soon. Looks like it’s time for me to hit that “Donate” button! I can’t believe he’s giving this software away for free!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.