I’m a big fan of creating clean and simple applications which can be easily expanded through the use of extensions, hence my love of Firefox. Yet, Firefox isn’t the only application which has extensions, and Apple’s Mail.app, an OS X e-mail client, also has tons of great extensions which expand the functionality of Mail.app and lets it do some pretty cool things. Hawk Wings has an extensive list of plugins and addons for Mail.app which is really cool. Some connect to existing e-mail services like GMail+Growl and the GMail Notifier, while others allow for mail forwarding, provide spoken notification of new e-mail, encrypt e-mail and help Mail.app integrate better into other applications. If you’re a fan of Mail.app and use it often, you will definitely find some cool and useful tools here.

One of the most powerful features of Apple’s OS X Tiger is the Automator application which lets you create scripts to perform certain actions on your Mac based upon different inputs. One cool thing you can do is send your Mac a text message via your mobile phone, in order to put it to sleep. Imagine going to see your relatives for the holidays and you forget to turn your Mac off; now you can just use your phone to save some money on the power bill. In order for this to work, you need to have a phone which lets you send text messages to an e-mail address, then by using Mail.app with a custom Automator script, you can easily do it.

What would you say is the number one problem with new technology? Many people might think that actually learning a new piece of technology is the number one answer, but when you really think about it, it is those that exploit the technology to annoy other users to no end. The internet added spam mail and popups (among other annoyances) to the list, adding to traditional annoyances like junk mail and telemarketing phone calls. Want to get rid of it? Check out this article called the Do-it-yourself: Stop junk mail, email, and phone calls which has some pretty useful tips for getting rid of them. Not the most exhaustive guide, but definitely extremely useful, so go read it!

Recently, Forbes made a little bit of buzz on the web by offering a web form which allowed its readers to send themselves an e-mail message in the future - 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years into it. While it may have been cool as a toy, there are legitimate uses for this kind of thing (who is going to have the same e-mail in 50 years?) such as getting e-mail reminders for getting certain tasks done. The originator of the idea is probably FutureMe which has been around for a few years already. The idea is simple: put in your e-mail address, a subject, and description (like you would any e-mail), then select whether to make it public or private, and select exactly what date you’d like to send the message on. You could easily use FutureMe along with some mail filtering to keep yourself organized.

I wrote about Goowy, a new Flash-based e-mail service with some great features including a nice contact manager and calendar, as well as games. At the time, Goowy only offered a 100MB inbox, but this has been increased with the latest update which also offers some other great goodies.

Looking at the stats for TipMonkies, I know that some of you like to stay subscribed to our posts via RSS to e-mail subscription services. Why we don’t provide this service ourselves, I don’t know, but there’s a great service called Blogarithm which works great for those of you who prefer e-mail over RSS aggregators. Using Blogarithm is super easy - just enter the web address of the site (no need to know or have the feed URL) and your e-mail address, and the service will e-mail you any time there’s a new post on that site. If you sign up for an account - free by the way- you can manage all your e-mail subscriptions with ease. By the way, we will be adding a Blogarithm subscription button to the sidebar for those of you who prefer this sort of thing.

I’m sure most of you remember to make backups of your important data every few weeks (you do remember, right?), but even then, you may not remember to make backups of important e-mails off your e-mail client (one of the main reasons why I use a web-based e-mail solution and not a desktop client). Boing Boing has a pretty neat tip on how to use a GMail account to back up your e-mail on a Mac (if you use Mail.app). From the article:

I asked people to resend certain emails, including Charles Platt, and he gave me this great tip: set up a rule in Mac’s Mail.app to send a copy of every email that goes in and out over to a Gmail account. That way, you’ll always have a searchable archive of all the email you send and receive.