HMAUS Signal Supporting Macintosh and Apple Users in Hawaii

by Christopher Breen

Sending iCal invites to the many

Reader C wishes to communicate with several people at once. The initialed one writes:

Can I make iCal email an event to more than one user?

Sure. It wouldn’t be much of a calendar application if it couldn’t. It can do this in a couple of ways.

In Leopard’s version of iCal, just click on the event and press Command-E to edit it. Click the Add Attendees link and in the field that appears, type the name of a person you’d like to invite. If that person appears in Address Book (and has an email address), iCal will autofill the email address for you. If they aren’t in Address Book, just type the email address.

To enter another address, type a comma and type the new name (if they’re in Address Book) or address. Repeat as necessary. When you’ve finished entering addresses, press the Return key and then click the Send button. Mail will launch and your invitations will be sent to the addresses you entered in the Attendees field.

You can also add multiple attendees by dragging several selected contacts or a group directly from Address Book onto the Add Attendees link. This is useful when you want to quickly add all the members of your platoon, bridge club, or extended family.

Mail and its hidden headers

Like many people, reader S. B. is concerned about spam. He writes:

Mail’s junk mail filters work pretty well for my use, but sometimes I need to open a message in the junk mail folder to determine if it is really spam or if it is coming from a new contact. I always keep the preview pane closed. In older programs I could view long headers or the raw source without opening the actual message. But in Mail, that is not an option, as these menu items are grayed out until you open the message. Is there a way around this? I realize that the junk mail filter does not initially load images, but I don’t know if it still pings the spammer’s server.

As you’ve observed, Mail doesn’t offer that option. Microsoft Entourage lets you view both long headers as well as the message’s raw source in a separate window. And Mozilla Thunderbird, while it won’t show headers with the preview closed, it will display the message’s raw source.

But before you dash off to install a different email application, let’s examine the real threat here. And that threat is HTML links–particularly links to graphics that, when loaded, send a little “yoo hoo!” message to the spammer, letting them know that they’ve found a live one. To keep these images at bay in Mail, choose Mail -> Preferences, click the Viewing tab, and make sure that the Display Remote Images in HTML Messages option is unchecked. This should keep you safe.

All you have to do from this point on is to be careful about loading images or clicking links in your messages. If you don’t trust or don’t know the source, take what you can from the text and leave the links and potential graphics alone.

If you’re still spooked by the idea of viewing headers along with a preview of a message–even without HTML turned on–you can follow this little tip from Macworld’s Gemmeister, Dan Frakes: Give Limit Point Software’s MailCM a try. This is a contextual menu plugin/pref pane that, among other things, lets you copy a message’s headers without opening or previewing the message. Of course you’ll have to then paste that header into a text document or empty email message in order to examine its contents, which seems like an incredible pain in the neck to me. But then, I’m not easily spooked.

The search-by-label blues

Despite his elders’ admonition that labeling just isn’t cool, reader Jon Co would like to put Leopard’s labels to good use. He writes:

In Leopard is there a way to search by label? It seems the new Command-F search has dropped it as an option and I have about a thousand pictures labeled blue so I can keep them in a smart folder. Now when I open that folder, it’s a collection of everything. Is there some hidden way to search by label or am I missing something?

It is hidden and therefore, yes, you are missing something.

When you choose File -> New Smart Folder and, in the New Smart Folder window, click the Plus (+) button, you can be forgiven for thinking that Leopard is pretty miserly about what it allows you to search for. Click the pop-up menu labeled Kind and you see just Kind, Last Opened Date, Last Modified Date, Created Date, Name Contents, and Size.

Ah, but take a look at that promising Other… entry at the bottom of the list. Choose that and a rich, searchable world opens. Specifically, when the search attribute sheet appears, you want to enter Label in the Search field. Do so and you’ll find that File Label appears as the sole entry. Select it and click OK. The first condition in your search now reads File Label followed by Leopard’s array of label colors. Click the blue color and all items you’ve labeled blue will appear in the window. Click the Save button and you’ve got a smart folder that contains all blue-labeled items.

Posted under Mac 911