Rating: 5/5

MailTags is a must have add-on for Apple’s Mail.app. As the developer’s web states: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìThe revolutionary plug-in that turns Mail.app into a powerful email organization system.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù And they are quite correct. Before MailTags I would wrack my brain to come up with useful rules to deal with organizing the copious amounts of email I deal with from a variety of sources.

After MailTags, well about the only ?¢‚Ǩ?ìrules?¢‚Ǩ¬ù I use anymore are ones to clear general inboxes into selected mailboxes, mostly to keep the servers and Mail.app happy regarding total quantity of messages.

The interface is well designed and intuitive to use. You are up and running lickety-split once you click on the installer to put the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbundles?¢‚Ǩ¬ù in place that Mail.app uses for add-on functionality. You can put in customized keywords, set deadlines that are then populated to iCal and add notes.

Another nice thing is, if you’ve decided to use EagleFiler as a data management tool it also handles archiving email ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù it imports your MailTags information. That’s quite a nifty feature tie-in. I hear rumors that Leopard is going to mess with the ability of MailTags to function and I sure hope that isn’t the case (unless they’ve managed to work with this Dev to include the amazing organizing capabilities in Mail.app in Leopard, which would be beyond cool, but I doubt it).

Since I’ve been going a bit freeware and shareware happy of late one of my most frequently used tags is the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìsoftware license?¢‚Ǩ¬ù label so I can find all those codes sites and developers are sending my way. This is really something worth looking at if you deal with even a moderate amount of email on a regular basis. It’s truly wonderful to be able to do a keyword search and be able to find the group of messages you need to look at rather than doing more generic searches that pull up spam and other junk you have to still wade through.

Give it a try, there’s a 21 day trial period, educational and volume licenses available by contacting indev Software directly.

Price: $29.95

Site: http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html

Screenshot

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: Do I think it should have kept it’s old name, Textpander? Definitely, but that doesn’t change the fact that TextExpander is an amazingly useful app. Face it, you’d rather not type the same word or phrase over and over again. TextExpander saves you from this repetition, and possibly carpal tunnel syndrome. To insert any piece of text you use often, type in the predetermined trigger word. For example, to insert my canned emails I use a word with its vowels removed, Web 2.0 style. Incredibly useful are the free add-on bundles of snippets. Something I would like to see changed would be to have user submitted bundles, as they’re really convenient. The only thing I really missed in TextExpander was a really quick way to add new snippets without using the menu-bar item. A simple shortcut that allows you to input the trigger for new snippets would be great. Still, anyone who dislikes typing will love TextExpander.

Retail Price: $29.95

Site: http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/

Rating: 3/5

General Info: Email has become one of the worst ways to contact people. Mainly because of spam but also because so many people have it and there are so many people to email! E-mail Commander is an app for easily sending many different emails to many people or all of your contacts. It has also support for multiple formats such as WYSIWYG and HTML emails. Very useful features are included like a bounce checker. To sum it all up E-mail Commander is a great app for sending a set of newsletters, wedding cards or anything you need combined with other useful features.

Retail Price: $ 24.95 (Single User)

Site:?Ǭ† koingosw.com