maclifehacks.com

Letterbox - make better use of your pixels with this widescreen plugin for Mail on OSX

Ok, for my first proper post (sorry for the delay, but my head’s been blocked solid with frozen phlegm for the last couple of weeks. ‘Snot been pretty, o-ho ho ho) I’d like to draw your attention to Letterbox, which is a simple but extremely groovy plugin for Apple’s Mail software.

The default setup for Mail is that you have a thin column on the left listing your mailboxes and folders, with the rest of the screen split horizontally, giving you a list of emails on top and a preview pane for a single email underneath that. I don’t know about you, but I always found that this gave me the worst of both worlds: too few messages visible in the list, and too little of the email body visible in the lower panel.

Letterbox instead splits the right-hand part of the screen into two columns: message list on the left, preview pane on the right. If you have a decent-sized screen (by which I mean at least 1280 pixels wide) then the three-column layout is a real improvement, with more messages visible in the list pane, and more of your selected email visible in the preview pane. It’s worked well for me on both a PowerBook 15″ screen (1280 pixels wide) and a MacBook Pro 15″ (1440 pixels), on OS X 10.4.8 and Mail 2.0/2.1.

Letterbox is the work of Aaron Harnley who, judging by the photo on his site, has got to be one of the youngest PhD students Columbia University have ever had. Now if only someone would invent a plugin that actually replies to my email without my needing even to read it, that would be just super.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Mail.app, plugins, Letterbox, email, productivity, maclifehacks