RelatedMail is Freeware. If my grand plans for more features are realized I might consider shareware in the future.
Screenshots
Installation
Quit the Mail application.
Download, expand, and mount the RelatedMail disk image.
Drag RelatedMail.mailbundle to
~/Library/Mail/Bundles ("~"means
a user's home directory). You might need to create the Bundles
folder if it does not already exist.
If you have never used another Mail bundle, you will need to run the
following two commands in the Terminal application:
Launch the Mail application, and look for the Show Related
Messages menu item in the View menu.
Indexing will take a while. During indexing only messages that have been
indexed will appear as related messages.
RelatedMail creates the following directories when run: ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere
and ~/Library/Logs/Pertinere. It does not modify your mail files in
any way. So to uninstall just remove ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere,
~/Library/Logs/Pertinere, and ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/RelatedMail.mailbundle
Explanation
The RelatedMessages plugin builds an index, similar to Spotlight, of
all your mail files, and uses that index to find messages related to the
currently
viewed message. The plugin determines relevance by looking at both the headers
and the contents of the message.
A given item in the related messages list shows the sender, date, subject, and
first sentence or two from the message. Above the item is a score
indicator &ndash the longer the bar the more relevant the message. Various
styles
are applied to the text
to indicate a particular relation to the currently viewed message.
Item
Styles
Sender
Black: same sender as current message
Gray: different sender as current message
Italic: sent from self
Date
Black: sent after current message
Gray: sent before current message
Subject
Bold: same subject as current message (and may be truncated)
The subject is a link to open the message in a new viewer window. Command
clicking on that link will open the message in the current Viewer. You can
change the ordering of the related messages by right clicking anywhere in the
related messages text area.
A few graphics are reused from Mail (sometimes flipped or rotated):
Graphic
Meaning
Message is a reply to the current message
Current message is a reply to the message
Current message refers to the message
Message refers to the current message
The number of messages from a given thread is limited, so that one thread does
not dominate the results. Mail already has tools for viewing all the messages in
a given thread, I do not want to duplicate that. RelatedMail has not been
extensively tuned for RSS messages but it does a decent job there as well.
Known Issues
Indexing takes time and is very disk and cpu intensive. Laptop users beware.
At the moment, there is no visual indication of progress.
RelatedMail will slightly slow down starting and quitting Mail. How
quickly the list of related messages appears depends on the speed of your
machine. I am always working on improving performance.
A preferences panel is being worked on. For now you have to edit the
Info.plist file inside the plugin bundle. Most items are fairly self
explanatory. If you are not comfortable editing these files wait until the
GUI prefs are finished.
There are sometimes graphics glitches during resizing.
Having the RelatedMail panel showing next to the MailTags panel can cause some
graphics problems. For best results, show the MailTags panel after the RelatedMail panel. I'm working on fixing this issue.
Occasionally, command-clicking on a mail link will not do anything.
Sorting is hidden in the contextual menu. I'm working on a better UI for
that.
Running more than one copy of mail at a time (for a given user) will cause
big problems. Don't try this.
If you feel the need to rebuild your ~/Library/Mail/Envelope
Index file, disable the related mail plugin before you do so, and
delete ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere before reenabling the plugin.
So the sequence would be: move plugin out of Bundles directory, delete
~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index and ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere,
start Mail and let it rebuild its index, quit mail, reenable plugin, and
start Mail again.
