When an email message is forwarded and replied to, email clients add quotes to make it easier to see exactly who wrote what. While this is normally quite useful, multiple quote levels can often make a message quite cluttered.

In many email clients (such as Gmail), quotes are shown as a symbol at the start of each line. If the text has been quoted twice, the symbol is repeated.



Now obviously you could click on each line and press delete, but this would take ages if there are multiple quote levels in a long message. The trick to getting rid of this type of quotes is to use the box selection method. To do this, hold Option (Alt) and drag a selection around the quote marks. This makes it so only the quote marks are selected, not the entire line. Annoyingly, this method doesn't work in some applications (such as Firefox). If you find it isn't working, try pasting your message into TextEdit before removing the quotes and then pasting it back into the email.

In the Mac OS X Mail program things are slightly different. Quotes are shown by vertical lines instead. While this may look nicer, it's not quite as obvious how to get rid of them. The answer lies in the Format menu, under Quote Level. From here you can increase or decrease the quote level of the selected text.



If you have multiple quote levels you want to remove it would be quicker to use the keyboard shortcut instead. To decrease the quote level simply select the text and press Command-Option-' (the apostrophe key). Every time you press this, one quote level will disappear, much faster than navigating the Format menu multiple times.

Apologies for the break being slightly longer than expected. Everything is back to normal now, so you can expect a few tips per week from now on.

Google Notifier is a menu bar item that alerts you when new mail arrives in your Gmail inbox. Back in February I wrote a tip on Google Notifier's hidden features that showed you how to access two hidden settings. Recently, someone at Mac OS X Hints found a third hidden setting in addition to the ones I mentioned in my tip.



All of these settings can be accessed through Google Notifier. Bring down the notifier menu and hold Command and Option while clicking on Preferences. This brings up a hidden settings editor where you can easily edit the notifier preferences file. The three settings are as follows:

1. Change the number of unread messages displayed.
By default, the menu shows the last four unread messages received (or the last three received and an additional "View More" submenu). To change this, enter "MaxMessagesOnMainMenu" in the key field and enter the number of messages you want on the main menu in the value field.

2. Filter messages by label.
If you only want the notifier to fetch mail with a certain label, you can create a filter. To do this, enter "Label" in the key field and enter the name of the label you want to receive in the value field. To receive all mail, leave this field blank.

3. Use a secure connection.
This is the new tip, submitted by an anonymous poster to Mac OS X Hints. It seems that Google Notifier normally transfers your account details and email in the clear so that other people can potentially read it. If you want to use a secure connection instead, enter "SecureAlways" in the key field and "1" in the value field. To reverse this, repeat the process but enter "0" instead of "1" in the value field.

For all of these settings you will need to quit and reload Google Notifier for the changes to take effect.

The Mac OS X Address Book is a neat little application that is often under-appreciated. As a seemingly boring application it has loads of features that are overlooked by most users. While useful on its own for organising your contacts, Address Book's real power is that it works with so many other applications. Here are a few tips to save you time and let you make the most of Address Book.



Add Contacts to your Safari Bookmarks
If lots of your contacts have their own web sites, you might be interested to know that you can automatically add these to your Safari bookmarks bar. Open up Safari go to the Preferences (in the Safari Menu). In here click the Bookmarks tab and check the box that says "Include Address Book" in the Bookmarks Bar. Now a new folder will appear at the far left of your Bookmarks bar. In here will be the web sites of all you contacts who have a home page set in their Address Book entry.

Chat to your Contacts
Address Book integrates quite well into iChat, the Mac OS X instant messenger. If a person in your Address Book is online and using iChat, a little green dot will appear next to their picture. Clicking on the dot will open up iChat, where you can start a new conversation with the person.

Put your Contacts in the Spotlight
In Address Book, select which contact you want to search, and from the Action Menu (looks like a cog, located in the top left) choose "Spotlight [name]". The spotlight window will pop up, and show documents, photos, iCal events, mail messages and iChats related to this person. This is one of my favourite features of Spotlight - it allows you to use it as a personal organiser and links together Address Book, iCal, Mail and iChat.

If you don't have Address Book open, you don't need to bother opening it up to Spotlight search someone. Simply type their name into Spotlight for the same results.

Moreover, Spotlight remembers files that people have sent you. When searching for one of your contacts, Spotlight will list any files they sent as attachments to you, providing you received them in Mail.

Highlight Groups
If you hold down the Option key while you are viewing a contact, all the groups that they are in are highlighted in a lovely yellow.

Get Directions
You can easily get a map of a person's address using Address Book. Just click on their address and choose "Map Of" from the menu that appears. This will load up Safari (or your default browser) with a MapQuest map which allows you to get directions to and from the address. If you prefer to use Google Maps or Google Earth to view a map (or satellite image) of a person's address, there is a Google Maps Plugin available.


Merge two contacts
If somehow you end up with two entries in your address book for the same person, you can easily merge the two. Select the two entries by clicking on one in the list and then Command-clicking on the other. Now click on the Card menu and choose "Merge Selected Cards". If you have a huge contact list and you suspect some duplicate entries, you can also choose "Look for Duplicate entries" from the Card menu.

Large Type
If you want to read a person's phone number off the screen while dialling it across the room, you can make it display in large numbers across the screen. To do this, click on the number and choose "Large Type" from the pop-up menu.

Address Book Sharing
If you want to share your address book (for example with your family or secretary) you can do so providing you have a .Mac account. Open up Address Book and go to the Preferences (in the Address Book Menu). Click on the Sharing tab and check the box titled "Share your Address Book". Now click the plus icon to add people from your address book who have a .Mac account. People will only be allowed to view your address book, but if you select the "Allow Editing" option they will be able to make changes too.

Using vCards
In reality, most people don't have .Mac, so the standard way to share contacts is using vCards. A vCard is a file containing a contact's information that you can attach to an email and send to whoever you want. Luckily, vCards work really well with Address Book.

To create a vCard for a specific contact, select them from the list and right-click (Control-click) on their name. From the pop-up menu choose "Export vCard...".
To create a vCard that contains the information for all the people in a certain group, select the group you want from the list, right-click on it and choose "Export Group vCard...".

If you receive a vCard from someone else as an email attachment, you can add it to your address book in a couple of ways. If you received it in Mac OS X's Mail application, simply drag it from the email message across to Address Book. If not, save it to your Hard Drive and then choose Import vCards (Command-O) from the File Menu in Address Book.

Make Your Own Card
It can be quite useful to create an entry for yourself in Address Book as it is used for things like Autofilling forms in Safari. To do this, create a card as usual and fill it with all your information. Once you are done, choose "Make This My Card" from the Card menu. You will notice that your icon in the list changes and your photo now has "me" written in the corner. Now you can export your vCard using the method above to send your contact details to everyone in your address book.

Restrict Private Information
If you don't want to share all of your contact information with everyone you send your vCard to, you can choose to keep certain parts private. Go to the Address Book Preferences and check "Enable Private Me Card". Now when you edit your own card, you can use the check boxes to choose which information is exported as your vCard.

Printing Envelopes
You can print an envelope addressed to a contact by choosing Print from the File menu with the chosen person selected. In the print dialog choose Envelopes from the Style pop-up menu. As an interesting quirk, Address Book will address the envelope to everyone in the household if you have specified a spouse or child in the person's entry. For more information, check in this Mac OS X Hints page.

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Have HTML emails you want to archive and send to your contacts? Try an html to pdf converter to make their size smaller and more transportable. A PDF converter allows you to do such things to your documents. If you have a Word document to convert, you can convert them to PDF format as well.

You probably know that you can drag and drop chunks of text around Mac OS X. For example you could select and drag a paragraph from Safari to TextEdit. It's also fairly well know that you can drag files onto application icons in the Dock to open them in that application. Less well known is what happens when you drag bits of text onto Dock icons.

Doing this with different applications will produce different results. If the application will accept the text, it will darken when you hold the selection over it. Note that some applications will only accept the text if it is in a certain format (a web address for example). Here are the results with a few common applications. If you know of any more, add them in the comments.

1. Safari - If you drop a web address (i.e. something that starts with http://) on Safari, it will load up that address. If you drag any other bit of text, it will perform a Google Search on it. This is mainly useful if the text is from a non-cocoa app that doesn't have the "Search in Google" item in the right-click context menu.

2. Firefox - If dropped text is a web address, Firefox will load it. This is helpful if you want to view a site in a browser other than your default browser.

3. Mail - A new message will load up with the dropped text as the main message body. Annoyingly the text is placed in the body even if it is an email address.

4. TextEdit - As expected, this loads a new document containing the dropped text.

5. Skype - If the dropped text is a phone number, Skype will call it. This will also work with nicknames in your contact list.

6. Script Editor - A new script window will open up containing the dropped text. Script Editor will then attempt to compile it.

7. iTunes - If you drop a podcast address onto iTunes, it will subscribe to it. If the address isn't a podcast, iTunes will attempt to do it anyway (and fail).

8. Acquisition - Starts a new search with the dropped text.

9. Newsfire - Adds a new feed with the text as the address. (Why not try it out with http://feeds.feedburner.com/macosxtipsfeed )

10. Stickies - This will make a new Stickies note containing the text open up.

11. Dictionary - This will show you the definition of the dropped word. If you drop a selection of words, Dictionary will display the definition of the first. (In cocoa apps, it's probably quicker to use this keyboard shortcut).

Most of these also work if you drag the text to the desktop to create a text clipping first, and then drag it to the Dock icon.

Macworld has an AppleScript that is related to yesterday's iPod Notes Tip. This script takes your unread Apple Mail messages and allows you to read them on your iPod as notes. It's a long script so I won't write it here, but head over to the Macworld article to check it out.

Alternatively, click this link to automatically open up Script Editor with the script ready typed. Wherever it says <> put your user name. Now when you run it, it will create a folder on your desktop with all your Mail messages as iPod Notes files. Each will be titled with the Subject of the message, and there will be an index file containing links to each of the messages.

If you are confident editing the script, you can set it to create the folder on your iPod instead of on the Desktop (This wasn't done in the original because everyone's iPod has a different name and you have to have the iPod connected to run the script). If you want to leave it as it is, all you have to do is plug in your iPod and copy across the folder from the desktop.

To make things even more automatic, you could set up an iCal alarm that runs the script every morning before you leave the house.

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Create your own alert sound
Whenever Mac OS X wants to get your attention, it plays an alert sound. For example it does this when a dialog box appears, when you receive an email and as an iCal alarm. Your Mac comes with a nice set of alert sounds, but after a while they may get a bit boring.

You can add your own alert sounds by placing audio files in a certain folder. Before you do that however, you will need to convert your sound file to the AIFF format using iTunes. Open up iTunes and choose Preferences from the iTunes menu. In the Advanced section, click on the Importing tab and choose AIFF encoder from the pop-up menu. Click OK.

If the audio file you want to use is in iTunes, select it and then click on the Advanced menu. In here choose Convert selection to AIFF. If you audio file is somewhere else, hold Option while clicking on the Advanced menu and choose Convert to AIFF. This will bring up a dialog that will allow you to navigate to your audio file. Once the file is done converting, go back to the preferences and change the "Import Using" pop-up menu back to AAC.

Now we have to get this file to show up in the Alerts list in System Preferences, Mail and iCal. Open up your user folder, look in the Library for a folder called Sounds and drag the sound here from iTunes. Your new alert should now be in the list in the Sounds section of System Preferences.

Make your alerts visual
An alternative to the audio alert is a visual alert, which is basically a screen flash. You can turn this on in the Universal Access section of System Preferences, under the Hearing tab. This will flash the screen as well as playing an alert sound. If you want to get rid of the sound and just have the flash, go to the Sounds section of System Preferences and move the Alert Volume Slider all the way to the left.

Annoyingly, this will also mute the feedback you get when the volume is changed and the interface sound effects (like when you move something to the trash). If you're fine with this then use the method above. However if you still want these other sound effects, there is a better (but more complicated) solution.

Mac OS X will also flash the screen if for some reason it is unable to play the selected audio alert. To make this happen, open up TextEdit and press Command-Shift-T to convert the document to plain text. Save this empty file as Flash.aiff in the sounds folder inside your Library. If a dialog asks you which extension to use, choose .aiff.

Now if you look in your alerts list in System Preferences there will be an alert called Flash that does exactly that - flash the screen. This is because Flash.aiff isn't really a sound file. When your Mac tries to play it and can't, it flashes the screen instead to make sure you still see an alert.

A lot of people use gmail. A small part of those people are mac users with the macintosh address book application. And probabaly 95% of those users use Address Book with Apple Mail. The problem is that if you send an email through the internet based gmail but normally send them through Apple Mail, then, unless you have the address memorized, you'll need to get the address.

Why not just upload your email addresses from Address Book to gmail. Using AddressBookToCSV you can do just that. It will export your Address Book to a format read by the gmail internet application so that no matter where you are, you can have you addresses!

This tip was written by MacTipper, a great blog with loads of tips for Mac OS X. Check it out.

This tip is really a general Mail tip that isn't specific to the Mac, but I'm sure many mac users have had the experience of their mail client chopping off the end of long URLs. When this happens, the person who received the message containing the URL can't click on it to go to the web page.

An easy way to avoid this is to put your URL in when sending it. When the person you are sending it to receives the email, the URL will still be nice and click-able.

If you are using Gmail and choose not to receive your email in mail.app using POP, chances are you are using the free Google Notifier (formerly Gmail Notifier). This is a menu bar item that alerts you when new mail arrives and in its latest version, adds Google Calendar functionality.

One of the greatest benefits of this piece of software is its simplicity - just put in your Google ID and password and everything works. At times this makes the notifier look somewhat limited, however this couldn't be further from the truth.

The first hidden feature is to customise the number of messages shown in the notifier menu. By default, the menu shows the last four unread messages received (or the last three received and an additional "View More" submenu). To change this, pull down the notifier menu and hold Command and Option while clicking on preferences. This brings up a hidden settings editor where you can easily edit the notifier preferences file.

In the "Key" field, enter "MaxMessagesOnMainMenu" and in the "Value" field enter the number of messages you want on the main menu. Click Set, and then quit and reload Google Notifier. Now when you click on the notifier menu bar item, you will see the number of messages that you set. To return to the default setting, repeat the prcoess, putting 4 in the value field instead of the number you entered last time.

The second trick can be done in much the same way. If you only want the notifier to fetch mail with a certain label, you can create a filter. As before, click on the notifier menu and Command-Option-Click on preferences. This time, in the key field enter "Label" and in the value field enter the name of the label you want to receive. To receive all mail, leave this field blank. And again as before, quit and reload the notifier for changes to take effect.

When you set these preferences, you are actually editing Google Notifier's preference file (Library/Preferences/com.google.GmailNotifier). If you want, you can load up this file with Property List Editor or TextEdit and changes things yourself (be careful!) or you can achieve the same effect using the Terminal (Applications/Utilities). For example the previous trick could be done by typing the following into the Terminal:
defaults write com.google.GmailNotifier Label -string "YOURLABELHERE"

Finally you can extend Google notifier using plugins. I found the following on the Official Google Blog:

The Gmail Notifier supports plugins written in AppleScript, or full-blown Cocoa Bundles in Objective-C. Details about the Objective-C plugin API can be found inside the Gmail Notifier application bundle in the required header file, GGPluginProtocol.h (control+click Gmail Notifier.app -> Show Package Contents -> Contents -> Headers).

AppleScript plugins are written by simply implementing a handler like:

on NewMessagesReceived(messages, fullCount)
-- Your code goes here...
end NewMessagesReceived

To install, simply copy the script (plugin) to Library/Application Support/Gmail Notifier (create the directory if it doesn't exist), and restart the Gmail Notifier. An example of a great plugin for the Gmail Notifier for MacOS X is the Gmail+Growl plugin, which sends Growl notifications when new mail arrives.

For quite a while now the .Mac service has allowed you to create aliases for your email account. This means that you can create up to five alternative email addresses that all forward the mail they receive to your main .Mac email address inbox.

The greatest benefit of these aliases is their ability to protect your main address from spam. For example, you can use an alias to sign up to websites, forums and newsletters. If the alias becomes flooded with junk mail, it is easy to just delete it and create a new one.

Mail 2.0 (bundled with Mac OS X) provides a simple way to manage your email aliases. In Mail, click on the Mail menu and chooses preferences (Command-,). In the Accounts tab select your .Mac account and click on "Edit Email Aliases." This will open up the .Mac Webmail preferences (You may be prompted for your .Mac password). Scroll down to the bottom where you can add email aliases and change their colours.

After you save the settings here, messages sent to the aliases will be forwarded to your .Mac inbox. Moreover, when composing messages in Mail, you have the ability to send messages from these aliases by selecting the relevant alias from the drop down menu.

Currently there is no standard, easy way to move your contacts from Outlook to Address Book that comes with every mac. People new to Mac OS X, especially switchers from PCs or people upgrading from OS 9 often ask the question, and there is no proper answer. Mac OS X Hints has a number of tricks to get around this difficulty.

There are 7 methods mentioned:
1. If you have access to a PC, use a windows program called OutPort
2. Do it via Netscape Communicator
3. Use a program called ABFiller, which is very simple a straightforward
4. Converting to vCards if you have Outlook 2003
5. A more complex trick, using terminal to customise things
6. Importing CSV files to Address Book
7. Importing via Thunderbird

Altogether, these tips should allow you to import contacts into address book in just about every situation.

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Most tips that work with a standard part of a cocoa app (TextEdit, Mail), will work with any other cocoa app. Luckily, the font box is a fairly standard part of the UI, and luckily this means that you can use this tip with loads of applications.

Most cocoa applications have the ability to scale fonts mathematically. This means that you can resize a selection of text containing different sizes while keeping the relative sizing between fonts. It also means that if you want all the text on a page a little bit bigger, instead of selecting each size and changing it a bit bigger (the 12 point to 14 point, the 16 point to 18 point etc.), you can just do it relatively.

Select all the text in your document and open the Font panel ( Usually Format->Font->Show Fonts) and enter "*1.2" or another mathematical expression. The example given will multiply all font sizes by 1.2, but you can do anything, like "/2" to half the size, "*.0.75" to get 75% of the original size.

Also its worth pointing out you can also use addition and subtraction to change the point size, but that won't make the fonts scale relative to each other.

Here's a nifty tip that should work in all Cocoa apps (Mail, TextEdit, Safari etc.) If you can't remember how to spell a word, type the beginning and hit Escape for some word suggestions.

There are a number of different ways of doing this however. In certain places it isn't possible to press escape, because it does something else (like clearing the Google search box in Safari). In these cases you can use Option-Escape, or just press F5. These two alternatives may take a little longer, but seem to work everywhere.

So now if you can't spell something, you don't have to attempt the whole word, just put in the first few letters and let the system spelling dictionary do the rest.

Apple offers a great way to sync all of your data via .Mac, keeping your email messages, keychains and bookmarks up to date on all your computers. However it doesn't allow you to sync or back up your Junk mail filter training data. Moreover, this isn't stored on the IMAP server either, meaning it is very much stuck on one computer.

While you can't keep your junk filter training data syncing automatically, you can manually copy it from one mac to another.

Go to your user folder and navigate to Library -> Mail. Copy the LSMMap2 file to a backup or another mac. Before overwriting the existing LSMMap2 file on the second computer, you may wish to temporarily copy it to the desktop, just in case everything goes pear shaped (i.e. you copy the wrong one)

Some people make it a habit of adding everyone who mails them to their address book, something that happens automatically in services such as Gmail. In Mac OS X Mail this is possible thorugh a simple keyboard shortcut.

When reading an email, press Command-Y to add the sender to your address book straight away. Mail will even add the persons name, it it appears in the From field. To add more details like a picture or address you will need to actually open up address book sepereately though.

At the moment Gmail doesn't offer IMAP, but it does allow you to access your mail from Mac OS X Mail using POP. This means all your mail will be downloaded to Mail.app, but will leave a copy on the Gmail server, even if you delete or move message in mail. This means that its only really feasible to use your Gmail account from one computer, as messages marked read in mail, will still be marked unread in Gmail.

First you must enable POP access in hte Gmail settings. Go to your Gmail inbox and click Settings at the top. Go to the Forwarding and POP tab, and Enable POP from all mail (or just mail from now on if you wish).

Now switch to Mail and open up the preferences (Mail -> Preferences) then navigate to the Accounts tab, creating a new account with the following details:


Account Type: POP
Description: Gmail (or something similar)
Full Name: Your Name
Email Address: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Incoming Mail Server: pop.gmail.com
User Name: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Password: Your Gmail Password

Make sure Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is checked.

Authentication: Password
Outgoing Mail server: smtp.gmail.com

Make sure Use Authentication is checked.

User Name: example123@gmail.com (your gmail address)
Password: Your Gmail Password

Make sure Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is checked.

Authentication: Password

Click continue then Done. With the new Gmail account highlighted, click server settings, under outgoing mail server. In server port, type 465.
Close and save the account preferences.

An alternative to setting up Gmail with Mail is to use this stripped down web browser, intended solely for Gmail.

Whereas Gmail is fairly open and easy to implement into Mail.app, Hotmail is slightly more complicated if you don't have a Hotmail Plus account. Hotmail Plus offers access to your mail through Mail.app, and there is a workaround for standard Hotmail accounts, using FreePOPs.

If you have an MSN Hotmail Plus account, you can easily access your mail through Mac OS X Mail by installing the HTTP Mail Plugin.

Once installed, open mail and go to Preferences -> Accounts and create a new account with the following details:

Account Type: httpmail
Description: Hotmail (or something similar)
Email Address: example123@hotmail.com (your hotmail address)
Full Name: Your Name
Incoming Mail Server: hotmail.com
User Name: example123 (your hotmail user name)
Password: Your Hotmail Password
Outgoing Mail server: None

Close the window and Save the Account.

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One feature that Safari lacks is the option to email a web page to someone. This can easily be done by creating a bookmarklet to place in the bookmarks bar.

A bookmarklet is a small piece of Javascript that you can save as a bookmark and reuse. For the email page bookmarklet, enter the following into the address bar in Safari:

javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)

Now drag the globe icon at the start of the URL to the bookmarks bar, and name the bookmarklet "Mail this page" or something similar. When you click it, your email client will open with a new message containing the web address and the title of the web page. Now all you need to do is choose who to send it to.

Technically only your ISP can truly block messages from a specific sender, but you can get near enough using Apple's Mail app. This can be done by creating a rule that deletes messages from a particular sender.

Open Mail and go to Mail -> Preferences, then click on the Rules section. Add a rule and give it a name (Blocked, Barred etc.) in the description field. Then use the pop-up menus to select all mail from an email address, the delete it

e.g.

If ANY of the following conditions are met:
FROM
IS EQUAL TO
i_am@blocked.com

Perform the following actions:
DELETE MESSAGE

Alternatively make the rule move the message to another mailbox, so you can check though the emails just in case you ever change your mind.

In all cocoa applications (TextEdit, Mail etc.), two adjacent characters can be swaped by positioning the cursor between them and pressing Control-T.

This can be useful if you often end up typing "teh" and "becuase".