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.

Commencing noon EST today, online collaboration provider drop.io becomes Yahoo Mail's default 'Attach Large Files' provider. If you're wondering where you've heard drop.io mentioned before, drop.the company was recently featured on Time's list of the 50 best web apps of 2009.

Built on top of drop.io's open API, the change is a significant boost for the drop.io service, which up until now has provided users with free storage in the form of unlimited blocks of 100MB, as well as offering a premium service for enhanced features.

It's not clear at this time whether Yahoo! Mail attachments will also be limited to 100MB nor the extent of the integration between Yahoo! Mail and drop.io, but rest assured I'll update this post as more details surface.

For those of you unfamiliar, WideMail offers a range of customizations for Mail including the ability to have messages appear in vertical columns as opposed to the default "over under" view we're used to. The plugin also offers custom display settings like altering the color of messages, choosing what text to display in your inbox and spacing our your messages for a less cluttered look.

During beta testing of Snow Leopard, the developer promised the app would work but unfortunately, the final release of Snow Leopard has totally disabled the incompatible plugin. The developer is working on a fix now and one should (hopefully) be available soon.

Email is a convenient way to communicate, but some correspondence requires the extra effort of a printed letter. With Snailmailr, though, printed letters don't actually take a whole lot of effort. Just enter an address, type up to four pages, and pay $1, and your letter will be printed and mailed for you. Does it still count as more personal than email when you don't have to leave your computer to do it?

Snailmailr costs a little bit more than a stamp, but saves you the time of picking up stamps or printing them yourself. Including the cost of envelope and paper, $1 is a pretty reasonable price to pay. There's a little bit of an extra cost, though, if you don't want to be tacky: you can remove the Snailmailr logo from your envelope for an extra 15 cents. Everything else about Snailmailr looks good: they allow color images in letters, and they address environmental concerns by using recycled paper and buying carbon offsets.

Linux-powered netbook users that have been missing their doctors' appointments and kids' school plays because operating a calendar application on their tiny portable is, at best, clunky and painful, can finally breathe an accurately-scheduled sigh of relief. Srinivasa Ragavan, who is one of the user interface developers for the open-source Evolution personal information manager project, has taken it upon himself to develop netbook-happy frontends for the calendar and mail portions of Evolution.

The calendar interface, as shown off on his blog, makes use of the entire screen for the calendar view. It features a handy upper toolbar for navigation, and a powerful drop-down menu for selecting more viewing options. The mail frontend, named "Anjal," features such optimizations as a similar upper toolbar, a tabbed interface (something soon to be seen in Thunderbird 3), and Gmail-esque threading.

Srinivasa hasn't yet released any working source for the calendar interface, but the Anjal mail project is available for anyone willing to install Moblin on their netbook, or (for even more fun) build it from source.

[via All About Netbooks]

Despite all the buzz about the death of MySpace and its future as a more music-focused site that's given up on competing with Facebook, the social networking site is still around and rolling out new features.

The latest is MySpace Mail, which seems to be a full-on webmail service, @myspace.com email addresses and all. The rollout of MySpace Mail started on Thursday and should be available to everyone well before the end of the year.

Maybe MySpace is smart to get into the webmail game, considering the large userbase they'll start with right out of the gate. MySpace's appeal to the younger demographic means that @myspace.com could be the primary email domain for a huge number of kids and teens.

Bands could also use it to send email blasts to their MySpace contacts instead of just messaging within the site. Even if most people won't replace their existing email address with a MySpace one, don't underestimate the marketing potential of using MySpace to send messages to people who aren't on the site. MySpace.com could become the Internet's biggest source of indie-band spam.

[via CNET]

Postbox is a powerful email client based on Mozilla's Thunderbird, and, like Thunderbird, it now supports extensions. The selection of add-ons is limited right now, but it includes some useful ones: ReminderFox handles reminders and to-do items. Minimize to Tray is just what it sounds like, allowing Windows users to put Postbox in the system tray. Nostalgy adds keyboard shortcuts, and MozBackup backs up your messages and settings. This is a good start, but it'll interesting to see what other useful extensions pop up now that the door is open.

The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you're switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X's address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.

After hearing stories about Apple rejecting email clients from the iTunes store because they duplicate the functionality of Apple's own Mail app, I've started to get a little nitpicky about Mail. For example, it's annoying that Mail won't let you compose in landscape mode. A free app called Easy Writer cleverly works around that, though, making your mobile email experience a little bit more user-friendly.

Easy Writer can't change the Mail app itself, so it uses a bit of a hack to get the job done. Start a new message in Mail, then open up Easy Writer for glorious landscape mode. You can even pinch and zoom the text for better readability while you're working. When you're done with the message, tap the "send to Mail" button, and you're back in Mail with a completed message, ready to send. It's a bit of extra work, but until Apple adds these features to Mail, it's the best of its kind.

If you're looking for a little anonymity and security when signing up for download links or invite codes, a disposable email service is a good option. Instead of providing one of your working email addresses, just grab a meaningless temporary one from any of these sites and keep your identity hidden.

These five sites all provide RSS feeds for your address, which is handy. No need to return to the site after registration, just subcribe with your favorite newsreader.

MailCatch - Choose your own address or roll the dice. MailCatch also provides an iGoogle gadget and creates a subdomain (using your address) for quick access to your web inbox. MailCatch also provides temporary forwards, and they've got an FAQ and forums.

MyTrashMail - Offers password protected temporary accounts in addition to the traditional public variety. Note that the Firefox "toolbar" they offer requires you have the Google toolbar installed first. FAQ and about links are prominently displayed.

Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it's actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it's good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn't want to stop there: why not have a different badge for each account?

Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.

Mail.appetizer is a handy little plugin that enables you to preview incoming Apple Mail right on your Mac desktop. The Mail.appetizer window shows you the subject, sender, and a brief snippet of the message.

Once the plugin is installed (and Mail is restarted), you'll have a new Notifications option in your Mail preferences, with options to change:

• Which mailboxes show the notifications
• The font and size of the notification text
• Transparency
• Time to display the message

Mail.appetizer is in beta, and the plugin has a few known issues. But if you've been looking for a simple tool to preview your Mail messages on your desktop a la Entourage style, then we would give Mail.appetizer a shot.

There are currently builds for both Tiger and Leopard.

[via Cool OSX Apps]

Due to another company trademarking "G-Mail" in Germany, similar to Google's "Gmail" in the US, the search engine giant lost an appeal to use "Gmail" in the European Union. G-Mail stands for "Giersch Mail" in Germany, where Daniel Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery service -- if that's not email, we couldn't say what it is.

As a result, Gmail is now known as Google Mail in Europe. Google's email service is also known as Google Mail in the UK, where another company trademarked "Gmail" shortly after Google launched the service.

And the moral of the story is: The next time you launch any product or service, make sure to trademark the name before. As for Google, the company "got caught slippin" -- as we say in the hip hop world -- so too bad, so sad.

Is your email inbox overflowing with thousands of messages, or is it virtually empty, with only the few messages that have come in since the last time you checked it? It seems like a simple personal preference, but the answer to the question of whether you are an email "filer" or "piler" says a lot more about you than you might think it does.

While nobody can see into your inbox, the fact is that if you simply leave everything there and let it get pushed down by new messages that are coming in, you're almost certainly not giving enough thought to the things that hit your inbox. For pilers, the only clue as to whether an email has been dealt with is whether it is marked as read or unread. But all too often we read emails when we are not currently in a position to do anything about them. Even if we're careful about going back and marking messages as unread, they still get pushed down, out of sight, out of mind.

Right now, many of you with overflowing inboxes are probably screaming at your screen. How can we be so bold as to assume that we know if you're on top of your email or not based on this simple criteria? And plus, just last week we were writing about the virtues of Gmail. Gmail! You know, the email client made by that internet search juggernaut, Google! Surely if you need to find an email, it's only a search away. So why bother filing things at all?

Okay, we hear you, and understand your position. But there's really no gentle way to say this, so we're just going to come out and say it.

You're wrong.

Okay, there, we've said it. Everyone take a deep breath! Now let's look at how we can take such a controversial position in complete and utter knowledge that we are right, with not even the remotest possibility that we could be wrong. Alright then.

Have you ever lost your massive email database to a hard drive crash, inadvertent deletion, program failure, or monsoonal winds? Go on, it's okay to admit it; we're all friends here. Well now there's no need to let the failures of the past haunt you; now there's MailStore Home.

MailStore Home is a wonderful solution for people who have a need to backup their emails in a straightforward and simple fashion (read: everybody). Best of all, it's free. As in 100% free. It works with all POP3 and IMAP accounts (as in Gmail), as well as Thunderbird, Outlook, Exchange Server, Windows Mail, and many others.

MailStore Home offers a simple three step process for backing up your email accounts. Once you've downloaded and installed the free program (12 MB), open it up, click on import, enter the settings for your particular account, and double-click your newly created email profile. Wham! It's done. But unlike the 80's band of that same name, it won't wake you up before you go-go.

Once the backup is created, you can leave it in MailStore, export it to .eml, or burn it to a CD or DVD. Or, like me, you can lean back in your chair, lock your hands behind your head, and feel pretty good about yourself for backing up what really are your most important files (regardless of that picture of you and the Prime Minister of Malaysia).

[Via Cybernet]

Yahoo! has added a new feature to Yahoo! Mail that will make the webmail application more accessible to visually impared users.

Yahoo!'s R&D team in India has been developing Yahoo! Mail Classic to be accessible to everyone. The new developments include visually impaired access to mail on all standard screen readers with text to speech, sound icons and special Braille output.

Yahoo! has a team of accessibility experts that ensure their products benefit all users with disabilities which is expected from a company their size. However, where is Google? Are they working on a version of Gmail for the visually impaired? People out there are interested. IBM has been working on a special web browser for the visually impaired under the code name A-Browser.