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.

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.