Like a whole bunch of other folks (43Folders, Hawk Wings - 1, 2,), many of them far more Apple-savvy than me, I have downloaded and installed the Letterbox plugin for Mail. Oh, boy! How much better is mail with this installed?! Apple would be crazy not to buy this from Aaron Harnly (or pay the rest of his college tuition and then hire him).
As someone who has only recently been exposed to Outlook 2003, I’m still in two minds about the three-column mail view. When I first installed Windows XP on my MacBook Pro, I wanted a way to change Outlook’s layout to match Apple Mail. Now people are raving about changing Apple Mail’s layout to match Outlook. My jury is still out on this…
I have not decided which layout i like best yet, but i have not yet gone back to the original so I guess that is a good start.
Anyway as an OS X engineer myself, I have to say that it is probably not a great accomplishment to modify the layout (anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour of work i estimate). So I would say the chances for Apple to ‘buy’ this or hire Aaron based on this are pretty slim… :(
Before, or in addition to, using Apple Mail with the automatic email message preview feature activated, you might want to keep in mind that the preview feature is the same as opening an email message, and can send a message back to a spammer computer that your email address is an active one, thus opening yourself up to more spam from that particular spammer.
See this macosxhints.com article for one solution to this problem:
Delete Mail messages without using Mail’s trash
macOSXhints
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060101172515184&lsrc=osxh
Thu, Jan 5 ‘06 at 05:39AM ?? from: Tom Robinson
Another solution that would allow you to use the email preview feature with relative impunity is to have your spam automatically redirected to a spam mailbox so it never appears in the IN mailbox.