Tag: email

How to stop OSX Mac Mail threading/grouping emails and conversations together

The Webernets20 Comments

Grouped Conversations in Mac MailMac Mail has a feature now that groups emails with the same subject line together into a collapsed “forum thread” like manner, which saves space when you are looking at your inbox. The problem I find with it is that there just aren’t enough bells, whistles and foghorns to catch my attention when a new email arrives and its a reply to something in that thread. I need more than just the number in the bottom right corner incrementing. As a result, I have lost/not read some emails lately.

Thankfully, there is a solution for this, but it requires a bit of patience to implement as it is not a global fix. For some reason, emails are grouped by default, and you have to ungroup on a thread by thread basis…….Thanks Apple.

To do so, highlight the thread you want to ungroup, then in the menu bar select “View” and uncheck the option that says “Organise by Conversation”

Turn Off Email Grouping

Now you will see each email as a single item in your inbox again, and new and unread emails will go back to having that little blue dot to the left. If you want to continue to see threads from specific contacts in an ungrouped way, you can just ad a rule (in the rules tab in mail preferences pane) to highlight email from them with a unique background colour.

Ungrouped Email Conversations

Again, as I said, this isn’t global, its thread by thread. So if you REALLY hate this feature, a quick way to start making it go away is to select all messages in your inbox simulataneously (Highlight one, then click command and A) and then uncheck “Organise By Conversation”.

Change All Threads

If you are using Mac Mail as an RSS reader, this method also works to ungroup new posts on sites you are following.

If you have any other idea’s on how to work around this annoyance, please reply in the comments.

Clear the list of Recent Email Addresses on iPhone

The Webernets8 Comments

Clear Recent Email AddressesOver time I have sent a lot of email from my iPhone, and it seems like iOS4/5 remembers every one of them fondly. As soon as I start typing an address it offers me a list of all of those email addresses that I sent one email to 3 years ago, instead of the one I want, and use regularly. In this post I am going to show you how I cleared that list on my phone.

As you would expect, you need to download a third party app and hack into the bowls of your phone to do this. And if you do decide to do this, you do so at your own risk ok!

I found a program called iBackUpBot, which lets you modify a number of aspects of your iOS4/5 device. Its not a free program, but there is enough functionality in the trial version so you can clear your recent emails list though. There is a Windows and a Mac version, so the procedure will work on both systems. Download and install.

Once you have downloaded, plug your phone in, and open iTunes. The first thing you need to do is make a back up, because its the back up files you will be working on. To force a back up, Right click on your device in the iTunes side bar and select “Back Up” from the context menu.

backup-iphone

Once the back up is complete, you can close out of iTunes, but leave your phone connected. Now open up iBackUpBot. You will need to select the back up file you just created (by device name, date and time) and click it. It will then start analyzing your back up file. Once it has finished analyzing you will see a whole bunch of entries appear on the right. Dont worry about these, as we wont be using them for this procedure. The next step is to select “Plug In” from the menu, and then select “Recent Email Addresses”.

recent-email-addresses

You will be confronted with a window that prompts you to purchase the program, you can click the cancel button to make it go away. Once it disappears, a window called “Recent Email Address Viewer” will pop up and you will see the list of recent email addresses stored in your phones memory. You can now go through the list and delete the ones you don’t want to see any more, and keep the ones you do. Just click on the offending address then hit your delete key. Once your finished, click the “Close Database” icon to save your changes and close out the window.

close database

Now it’s time to reload your modified file back to your phone. Click the “Restore Backup To iPhone” button to begin. You will have to click OK/Accept in a dialogue box, and it will take a little while, so be patient.

restore-backup

Once everything is finished, you can close iBackUpBot, disconnect your phone and try it out!

Ahhhh…….No More irrelevant email addresses……….

MX Guarddog let’s one through!

The Webernets0 comment

MX Guard Dog LogoI guess the Guarddog was sleeping, or chewing on a bone, because a few emails from domains and addresses I have blacklisted are still coming through. I blacklisted On-One Softwares domain name (Good software, but they send a LOT of emails once you download a trial), and after receiving another email from them a few days later, I black listed the actual address the email come from. But alas, they are still coming through. I got two more from them today. There have been another few domains that sneak past the Guarddog, but On-One is the main offender. I will start tracking them no as well.

I have forwarded the messages to MXGuarddog, so we’ll wait and see if they respond.