SetSignature Plugin for Mail

One of the items that Apple has never solved adequately for me is having multiple email addresses in one account with an associated signature for each one. If I had one account for each email address, things would work fine, but I have a large number of email addresses in one account. So, a few months back, I coded up a plugin for Mail that does this automatically. Unfortunately, it stopped working with Mail 3.0 on Leopard, so for the last week I've felt like I've been typing with one arm behind my back is this plugin is vital to me. I had some time yesterday to fix it for Mail 3.0 and have decided to put it out there as a free product; I don't want to put out something that relies on unsupported calls and charge for it.

Feel free to use this in anyway you like; use at your own risk and if you have problems with Mail, remove the plugin and try again.

Installation instructions:

1. Quit Mail
2. From terminal, type:

   defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
   defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
   

3. Download the plugin
4. Uncompress the plugin and place SetSignature.mailbundle in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (create the folder if it it isn't there
5. Launch Mail
6. Name your signatures according to your email address, i.e. johndoe@nowheresite.com

Now when you reply to a message, it attempts to set the signature correctly. In addition, when you change the From address, it will attempt to match the signature with that address.

If you have any questions or problems, please post a comment. Since this is free, please don't bug me too much about it. It works for me and that's all I'll guaranteee.

The 1 gallon water challenge

Yesterday as I was attempting to remove a tree that was too close to our house, I managed to puncture a PVC irrigation pipe. Unfortunately, the only way to shutoff the water to the pipe was to turn off the water to the entire house (why anyone would put a shut off to the internal water, but not the external water baffles me). After a trip to Home Depot and a few attempts at repairing it, I finally succeeded. In order to let the PVC cement set, I had to leave the water off in the entire house overnight. We still had some clean water in our reverse osmosis system, but not enough to wash hands and brush teeth. So, I happened to have a few 1 gallon containers of water in my car. As I'm washing my hands with the water from the container, I start thinking of how much water we waste everyday. If I was restricted to using just a few gallons of water a day, I'm not sure what I'd do. Next time water is going down the drain, think about how many gallons of water you just used.

Why is it so hard to email support?

A few users of mine have had problems with the Fujitsu ScanSnap and ReceiptWallet/DocumentWallet under Leopard where they scan, but the programs don't open it. After a bit of futzing and not believing that my users had stuff configured, I had the same thing happen this morning as I was researching the issue. I've described the issue in a Knowledge Base article. Basically what happens is that the first time the ScanSnap Manager is launched and a document is scanned, the ScanSnap Manager doesn't send the necessary AppleEvent to open the document. I turned on AppleEvent logging and the first time, it does nothing, the second document, I get something like this:

------oo start of event oo------
{ 1 } 'aevt':  aevt/odoc (i386){
          return id: 833355777 (0x31ac0001)
     transaction id: 0 (0x0)
  interaction level: 112 (0x70)
     reply required: 0 (0x0)
             remote: 0 (0x0)
      for recording: 0 (0x0)
         reply port: 0 (0x0)
  target:
    { 1 } 'psn ':  8 bytes {
      { 0x0, 0x32d32d } (ScanHelper)
    }
  fEventSourcePSN: { 0x0,0x331331 } (ScanSnap Manager)
  optional attributes:
    < empty record >
  event data:
    { 1 } 'aevt':  - 1 items {
      key '----' - 
        { 1 } 'list':  - 1 elements {
          { 1 } 'alis':  326 bytes {
            /Users/scott/Pictures/Scans/2007_11_04_08_32_19.pdf
          }
        }
    }
}

Leopard Install Update

After a lot of work, I pretty much have Leopard working the way I want. I just went to software update and saw a Login and Keychain Update. Apple's support article says:

The Login & Keychain Update 1.0 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is recommended for all Leopard installations. It addresses issues you may encounter when:

Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.

Connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks.

Changing the password of a FileVault-protected account.

Hmmm. It is likely that my keychain has been hanging around for years and it definitely has 8 or more characters. Thanks, Apple!