In versions of Mail prior to OS X 10.6, you could copy an email address from a message by Control-clicking on the address and choosing Copy Address from the contextual menu. As part of my job, I do this a lot -- users will email me, asking to look up their account name, for instance, so I need to paste their email address into a web form.

In 10.6, it seems someone at Apple decided that Copy Address should really mean Copy Name And Address And Add Angle Brackets Around The Address, because that's exactly what happens when you use Copy Address in Snow Leopard's Mail app. Instead of getting Sue_Sample@somesite.com on the clipboard, you get Sue Sample <Sue_Sample@somesite.com>.

Besides now having an incorrect name on the Copy Address contextual menu item (thought admittedly, the alternative is a bit lengthy), this behavior is incredibly irritating if you want only the email address on the clipboard. Thankfully, some engineer somewhere deep within Apple included a hidden preference to change this behavior -- and the fine folks at Mac Daddy World (the Ecamm Network blog site) dug deep and discovered this preference.

As one of the oldest applications of the Internet, e-mail has never been known for having top-notch security. This reputation isn't completely undeserved: even today, anyone who knows how to bring up the preferences of a mail program can send out messages with any "From:" address they please. Ironically, such forged messages may travel to and from mail servers over encrypted connections. This helps make sure that nosy types with big WiFi antennas don't get to see your mail or passwords, but it doesn't keep your mail safe from equally nosy mail server admins—or subpoenas by nosy governments.

But not all hope is lost for e-mail. Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) can secure your mail by encrypting a message at the source and only decrypting it once it's in the hands of the receiver. S/MIME also supports digital signatures, so you can know for sure who sent the message and that it wasn't changed in transit. (Big caveat: the nosy governments could still be in cahoots with the certificate authorities, so we make no promises there.)

In the past, we've written about GPGMail, a plug-in that lets Apple's Mail.app use GNU GPG encryption. Unfortunately, GPG is a pretty unwieldy system and GPGMail could take a very long time to be updated for a new Mac OS X release. (There is currently a stable version available for Snow Leopard and an alpha version for Lion.)

The advantage of S/MIME is that it's built into Mail on the Mac and, as of last week, also in iOS. (I've only tried this using iOS 5 on an iPhone 4, but I assume things work much the same on iPads and iPod touches.) 

The recently released Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (read my review of it at The Guardian) includes a new version of Mail, Apple’s desktop email client. There are several new features in Mail that I’m enjoying, and one of the least promoted is the new Favorites Bar. I think it’s very useful, particularly if you like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, and so I’ve written this brief article describing how it works.

I have created some folders in Mail and one has about 387 emails in it that I've received. How can I send one email out to all 387 of them without doing them all one at a time?

For the past few months, I've been unusually happy with my overall email situation. I won't say it's perfect, but it's way better than it has been in the past - much better even than when I was running my own mail server on my own Xserve, a setup that I would have thought offered me the ultimate in flexibility and power. The ingredients I now rely on - Google's Gmail (via Google Apps Standard Edition, which lets me use my own domain name), IMAP, and Apple Mail - provide the sweet spot that best suits my needs. However, as I discovered through a considerable amount of trial and error, the recipe needed to combine all these ingredients into an edible dish was anything but obvious. For those who have had less-than-satisfactory experiences with their email providers and software (especially Gmail and Apple Mail, respectively), I'd like to share how I achieved my personal state of email satisfaction.

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En bra "email transfer class" för PHP som kan en hel del när det gäller att skicka mejl via PHP.