With the release of Panther, I started to make the switch to use Apple’s Mail.app after years of being a Eudora user. My main motivations were junk mail filtering (no longer free in Eudora 6) and threaded email (a must for someone who subscribes to a lot of mailing lists).
I must admit that I’m still getting used to some things in Mail.app — in Eudora I had developed an aggressive filtering strategy that put almost every email I actually wanted to read in its own mailbox, leaving only spam in the In box. This was a very Eudora-centric strategy, since Eudora popped open a new window for each mailbox that had new mail in it, helping me keep up with things. Since Mail.app doesn’t use per-mailbox windows, it’s a little harder to see mail that gets filtered straight into mailboxes. So far, I’m only using that strategy for mailing lists, which works pretty well, since I don’t need to monitor those as closely.
Mail.app is also not quite as smart as Eudora about “personalities”. For years, I’ve had mail to my personal address go into exactly the same mailbox as my work mail, and I’ve used Eudora to automatically manage my mail so that professional mail is sent from my work address with my work signature, and similarly for personal mail. Mail.app doesn’t like the idea of using more than one personality with the same POP account, and it doesn’t support the kind of automation that saved me from manually adjusting each email reply to reflect the personality… So my solution for now is to route my personal mail to my ISP’s mailbox, which I hadn’t really been using, and to try using Mail.app for personal mail and Eudora for work mail. Since I can still send from either “personality” in either app, this seems to work, although it may grow tiresome. Mail.app isn’t perfect, but it definitely feels modern, which Eudora certainly doesn’t.
Anyway, to get to the original point of this posting, one of the other great “modern” features of Panther’s Mail.app is supremely easy integration of security. Just follow these instructions that I found referenced on James Duncan Davidson’s weblog. Because of some limitations in Safari, it takes a few extra steps to get your certificate into your Keychain, but the instructions above are super clear. The only note is that if you use Firebird instead of Mozilla, you’ll find the Certificates pane in the preferences under “Advanced” instead of “Privacy and Security”. Once your certificate is in your keychain, messages sent from mail are signed by default, without a step of trouble on your part. And apparently Mail recognizes when you have a certificate for a message recipient and just as easily offers an “encrypt” icon — but I don’t have a lot of correspondents who have certificates. Yet.
Following his lead, here are the fingerprints of my certificate:
SHA1 94 B0 98 24 B4 67 B8 72 D4 75 9E C5 A6 2A 8D D8 A6 8C 32 DC
MD5 2F 39 4D 52 09 20 4F AC 05 39 4A 49 B9 BE D2 7F
Aren’t you worried that Thawte has your SSN, Drivers Licens #, or other personal information? I got to the part where I am to enter my SSN and warning lights went off in my head.
I didn’t like the SSN part either, especially since at the point where it was requested, it was described as an identifier, which made me think it would be fairly public.
I opted for my drivers license; as far as I can tell, it’s not part of the certificate itself, and as for Thawte having it, I guess I can tolerate it. Less trust-conscious organizations have my credit card number, which is easier for someone to directly misuse.
Have you tried adding more than one email address (separated by commas) in the Account pane email address text field? I have about 20 aliases I push all through one ‘account’ and Mail.app provides a drop-box for the address I want the email to appear to come from. Also I can drop-box the signature file (although i haven’t figured out how to make them correspond automatically)
MailEnhancer will handle the automatic correspondence between a sending address and a specific signature — it just looks for a signature with the same name as the sending address. It does a few other things too.
As for using multiple addresses for a single account, that’s good to know; I just began forwarding my personal mail to my ISP account rather my work mailbox, and I’m operating decently now. I’m actually still using Eudora for work email, although I have either configured to allow me to change the sender accordingly, so it is actually a pretty good balance — I can focus on the right “kind” of email by selecting either app, but when sending, I can use whichever one is more “handy”.
I think I love you. You know how long I’ve been looking for an elegant solution to the multiple email alias issue? I’d just been using multiple accounts with fake login info, but with every update, it gets more and more difficult to make that work. This is beautiful.