david frank » projects » mailpriority

MailPriority 1.4.1

Add message priorities, message coloring and
return receipts to Mail.app   » What's new in 1.4?   » Download!

What is it?

MailPriority is a plug-in for Mail.app on Mac OS X providing a simple interface to

• set Priorities for outgoing messages by setting the X-Priority header
• organize your mails by color-coding messages
• request Receipts by setting the Disposition-Notification-To header
• permanently show th 'Reply-to' and 'Bcc' fields when composing a new message
  (10.2 only).

Features

• Once started, the 'Edit' menu in Mail.app has a new item 'Priority' allowing to set a Priority between none and 1 to 5.
• In the Compose and Reply window, you can add toolbar items (by customizing the toolbar) to set the Priority (off/level 1..5) and to request a receipt.
• In all other windows, you can add a toolbar item (by customizing the toolbar) to show the Priority of a selected message.
• MailPriority also adds a new Preferences panel which lets you choose a default Priority for new messages and a color scheme for highlighting incoming message priorities.
• Cntrl-Click on the message list shows a new contextual menu item 'Colorize' which allows to assign colors to messages.

Installation

• Start MailPriorityInstaller and follow the instructions

or manually:

• Quit Mail.app
• Create a new folder named Bundles in ~/Library/Mail/
  (where '~' is your home directory)
• Copy MailPriority.mailbundle into ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
• In Terminal, write:
  defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles YES
  and hit return.
• (When using Mac OS X 10.3:) In Terminal, write:
  defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 1
  and hit return.
• Launch Mail.app
• Compose a New Message (Cmd-N)
• Add the Toolbar Item 'Priority' to the 'New Message' window toolbar.

Limitations & Known Issues

• Installer does not work if FileVault is enabled (this is a known AppleScrip issue).
• Sending receipt requests is not implemented yet (only requesting receipts from others).
• On some keyboards (e.g. german) the shortcut to set the Priority (cmd-option-<priority number>) does not work for Priority 5 as cmd-option-5 is the same as cmd-'[' which is already used by Mail.app.
• Setting the Toolbar to 'text-only' results in unusable toolbar-items for 'popup-menu-style' toolbar items in already-open windows.
• Marking a message as 'Junk' sets its color to black.

Thanks to

• Mario for the initial idea and for beta testing.
• Stéphane Corthésy for making the source of GPGMail available.
• Dominik Westner for making the installer source of MailPictures available.
• Adam Betts for sending me the cool icons!

Contact

I welcome feedback on MailPriority. If you have bug reports or suggestions please send an email to david.frank@parapunzi.ch.

Copyright and Disclaimer

MailPriority is copyright 2003 David Frank. I reserve all rights to this piece of software. I take no responsibility for any damage this software, through omission or error, causes. This software is provided as is and with no warranty.