Central Florida Geeks January 28, 2009
Posted by Ryan in : Local, email, linux, phone, Video ; comments closed
CFGeeks is a community / mailing list / meetup / whatever mostly made up of Linux guys, sysadmins and Ham radio operators. I have been following the mailing lists since some time last year, after I found a bunch of pointers to it through local Linux user groups, like GOLUG and LEAP-CF.
The group was created by a guy named Kevin Inscoe (ke3vin), who currently does some administrative stuff at local publishing juggernaut Harcourt.
The other day I went to a lunchp, which is based on an old LISP joke… adding -P to something is like asking a yes/no question. Moviep? Skycraftp? and of course Lunchp? are asked quite often on the list.
To my understanding, this was the first lunchp in some time, but it was well-attended, and there were some good conversations, stories and historic context thrown around, along with the random YouTube video on someone’s laptop. It kind of felt like all the time you spend in a big office wasting time standing at your friend’s desk… except none of these guys work in the same building (though I think some of them used to).
In true new media fashion, there’s a Flickr set of photos from lunchp, and a uStream video Kevin made just as I got to the meetup.
If ANY of the above are remotely attractive to you, or if you want to talk about iPhone development, I highly recommend you join a mailing list, give out your callsign, follow these guys on twitter, and go to lunchp this Friday downtown at Panera Bread. It’s worth it.
Smart Mailbox Formula: Flagged Messages October 29, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : HowTo, Tech, email, interface, Mac OS, Teaching ; comments closedOne very simple way to keep your email organized is by using flags in Apple’s Mail program. 
If you’re like me, you are pulling in most, if not all, of your messages from a GMail or a Google Apps account. This means that your “starred” items in your Google Mail will also be “flagged” once they get to your Mac.
Flagging messages in Mail.app can be done via the menu Message > Mark > As Flagged, or by simply pressing Command-Shift-L when you have selected the message(s) you would like to flag.
Creating a Smart Mailbox is very simple. Just choose the menu item Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox…
At this point, you be presented with a popup box asking you for a Smart Mailbox Name, and several options. The first line of options reads:
Contains messages that match all of the following conditions:
You can also match TODO items, or ANY of the following conditions. For this example, we will leave this line alone.
The first condition by default matches the “From” email address of any messages. This is what we want to change:
Click on the select box for “From”, and choose Message is Flagged from the list. The other options in this condition will disappear.
This Smart Mailbox is already pretty useful, but our Flagged messages from several months ago probably aren’t too useful any more, so we’ll add another rule. Click on the plus to the right of the popup box to add a new condition.
When you are finished creating this new rule, the second line should read:
Date Recieved is in the last 60 Days
Before you press OK, take a seecond to admire your work. You’re being smart with your email.
After you OK the creation of the new Smart Mailbox, a new “Flagged” item appears in the left sidebar of your Mail window with a little purple icon. If you don’t see it, click the words SMART MAILBOXES until the arrow to the left of the words is pointing down, and your Smart Mailbox should appear.
All of your flagged messages from the last 60 days are in this smart mailbox, but they have not been moved from their home in your other mailboxes either. If you remove the flag from a message with Command-Shift-L, the message will no longer appear here.
While this is all great, I did notice one annoying thing: Since all my mail is coming in from a GMail server, several of the messages in this folder were duplicates, because they also appear in GMail’s “Starred” folder. In order to fix this problem. I selected my Smart Mailbox, and then chose the menu item Mailbox > Edit Smart Mailbox…
Once you’re editing again, just add a rule that reads as follows:
Message is in Mailbox: Inbox
After you OK this change all your duplicate GMail messages should disappear.
If you’ve got a Smart Mailbox Formula that helps you wade through the ocean of information we all seem to be swimming in these days, please share it in the comments below. I’m sure we could all use a little bit of help.
Use Smart Mailboxes to Organize Your Email October 26, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : HowTo, Tech, email, interface, Mac OS, Teaching ; comments closedIf you’re anything like me, you tend to hold on to your email for months, years, or pretty much all of eternity. 
Now that I have things like Google Apps for Your Domain and IMAP, I can literally keep as much of my email as I want, and always get access to my full message history. On top of this, I have 7 inboxes to check.
There are several advantages to this system as far as I can see – I never have to worry that someone has the wrong email address, or one I no longer use, because I always know the message will arrive on my desktop, but at the same time live somewhere on dark and dank hard drive deep in the Google infrastructure, wherever that may be.
Here is my big problem: I get dozens of messages a day. On the day I wrote this tutorial I had received 20 messages by noon! How on earth am I supposed to keep track of the messages I want to keep, without abandoning my pack rat nature?
My solution for now: Smart Mailboxes. You’ve at least seen Smart Playlists in iTunes – the program ships with a few of them baked in. The Finder also features a few pre-selected searches under “search for” on Leopard. Apple’s Mail.app has had Smart Mailboxes for some time now, and it’s about time you got a little more insight into what is going on with your mail.
The very simplest way to create a Smart Mailbox is to use the little search box in the top right of your Mail window and push the Save button. That’s really all there is to it. You can choose a few simple options from the popup box – the application has already chosen a sensible folder name for you, based on what you searched. You could try searching for something related to a big project you’re working on, or all the messages from a particular friend, or a group of friends. The possibilities are endless.
What are some of your favorite Smart Mailbox formulas? I’d love to see them in a comment.
