Act-On Plug-in for Mail.app

Published 30 August 05 by Justin French, 2 comments

About six months back, I got rid of my complex nesting of Mailboxes, and switched to something very similar to Merlin’s approach, which is working out quite nicely.

My biggest complaint is that I get really sick of dragging the emails around (I find myself hating the mouse and loving the keyboard these days), which resulted in me getting lazy. Instead of processing each email straight away (dragging it to a new location like action or archive), I’d let my inbox get a little out-of-control before going through and processing it all.

Then Mail Act-On comes along with a simple, elegant, highly extensible solution which allows me to create special rules in Mail.app which I can assign to a keyboard shortcut (Control-something). Wonderful! I’ve been using it for a day or two, and it’s now a must-have extension to Mail.app.

I particularly like the way I can stack multiple rules on a single shortcut. I have Control-a assigned to 5 different Rules (all of which move an email to the archive folder on my 5 different IMAP/POP accounts), another 5 assigned to Control-c which will move emails to action folders, Control-r for reply, Control-h for hold, etc.

I’m going to keep trying this out for a week or so, then if it all works out, Scott Morrison can certainly expect a donation from me.