When it comes to organizing your email inbox, Apple's Mail.app isn't the most sophisticated offering out there. FlagIt! is a mail add-on that lets you quickly mark your messages as urgent, pending or to-do. It adds its own set of flag icons to the seldom-used "flag" column in Mail, and sets the titles of your messages to the corresponding colors.

Once you've installed FlagIt!, you can start flagging by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on messages in your inbox and scrolling down to "Mark." In addition to flagging messages, you can set up custom flags and mark messages as completed right from this menu. All the default Mark menu items are still there, too, so you can mark as read or unread like you normally would. One word of caution to Snow Leopard users: to make FlagIt! work, you'll have to put Mail.app into 32-bit mode. You can do that by selecting Mail in the Finder and doing a Get Info.

I've been a user of Gmail since late 2005 and have loved just about every minute of it. The revolutionary webmail interface, the vast popularity among power users and plethora of scripts, add-ons and doodads - but the one thing that always bothered me was the loss of integration with the rest of my computing. Sure, there are some great tricks and bookmarklets we found for our Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks post, but I've missed real integration with Mac OS X apps like iSale that can show me emails related to an auction I created with it, iPhoto that can compress copies of 20 images and attach them to a new message and even simply double-clicking a .VCF I've downloaded to quickly add it to Address Book and keep on working. Heck, toss in a dash of Automator and I really find myself longing for a desktop email client and the synchronized wonders of IMAP.

Thus began my journey to figure out some sort of a hack or workaround for using Gmail over IMAP with my preferred and well-integrated desktop email client, Apple Mail. It wasn't too difficult, but the setup requires your own web host who offers IMAP email that can scale up to around 2GB or more (for example: I already pay for hosting at DreamHost which offers IMAP with every account, but some companies offer free IMAP, and other hosting companies offer flexible solutions as well) and a little bit of incoming/outgoing server trickery. Another necessity is some sort of tool or plug-in to enable one of Gmail's most well-known features: tagging, otherwise known as labels. While Thunderbird is probably the first fairly mainstream email client to do tagging out of the box, it drops the ball on my need for integration; it doesn't support Apple's built-in Address Book (which so many other apps do), and it doesn't plug into all the other handy tools that allow so many of Mac OS X's 3rd party apps move data from one to another so effortlessly. For what it's worth, I also found a plug-in for Outlook on Windows called Taglocity that should get the job done, though I can't test it because I don't own Office. That said, all my setup instructions are written using Apple Mail, but you should be able to apply them to any IMAP-capable desktop email client and tagging plug-ins you find. As a bonus, this trick will also work for mobile devices that support IMAP, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and, of course, your shiny new iPhone. Following is my 7-step trick for using Gmail over IMAP, leveraging the power of desktop software while bringing the innovation of Gmail's tagging and conversations along for the ride.

One of the things that is most apparent when you switch to a Mac is the quality of the built-in applications that come with the Mac operating system. It's pure joy to not have to go searching for a calendaring program, since iCal is so full-featured. One that is perplexing, however, is Apple Mail, or Mail.app as the Mac-heads tend to call it.

Apple Mail is beautiful in its simplicity and has some really powerful features like the ability to build Smart Mailboxes, which are effectively folders that have a persistent search criteria populating them. With everything that it has going for it, Apple Mail fails miserably in one very fundamental way: weak keyboard shortcut options, and specifically the ability to file messages to different folders based on keyboard shortcuts.

If you've found yourself stymied by this oversight in Apple Mail, fear not... there is a solution. It's called Mail Act-On.

Mail Act-On allows you to do almost anything you'd want to do with a message or group of messages with a single keystroke. It builds on the fantastic Rules preferences pane in Mail to allow complete flexibility with respect to the action you'd like to perform on a message; anything from flagging messages, coloring them, filing them or automatically replying to them. Literally anything you can create a rule for, you can set up as a keystroke action.

This functionality is so well thought-through and implemented that almost instantly you forget that you are using an add-on. This is something that simply should exist in Apple Mail, but for now, you can just install the free Mail Act-On add-on and rejoice at your newfound power.

This one is for the Mac users in the audience. The Apple Mail Plugins and Tools page offers quick links to almost every known plugin for Mail.app. When I stumbled on it the other day, I was amazed at the range of functionality people have added to Mail, especially given the undocumented plugin API. Some of my personal faves, like the all-important GPGMail are featured, as well as some nifty autoresponders and templaters to handle form letters and mailing lists. A word of caution, though: there seems to be a "Hotel California" check-in policy for the list. There are some jewels, but there are also some broken links and apps that don't seem to have been updated since Jaguar.

Also, don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page, where the authors have set up an open "wanted" list for Mail functionality. Again, some of the gripes are outdated and have been fixed by Apple, but it still interesting to see all of the suggestions in one place. Hopefully, the Mail team is watching.

Does your Mac have a nice wide screen? Can't figure out why Mail.app puts the preview pane underneath the message list? Now it's easy to make it display everything in three nice, tall columns with this Mail.app plugin. The installation couldn't be simpler, so go ahead and get started.

[Via TUAW]

Over at O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center Blog Robert Daeley has a fun how-to on how to make iTunes play a particular song (or portion of a song) whenever an e-mail is received from a particular person, a la obnoxious cell phone ringtones. So if you want every e-mail from your grandma to play her favorite Eazy-E song, you can make it do just that. Of course it's done through the magic of AppleScript, so head over to the Mac Dev Center Blog to see the code.