I’ve been using my Gmail account as an IMAP account with Apple Mail for a while now. Mostly, it works well but I’ve always been irritated by the additional mailboxes which are added to Mail’s sidebar as a result. Often they’re out of sync with the Gmail box which sits under Inbox at the top of the sidebar.

Thankfully, there is a workaround as this post on Mac OS X Hints describes. I’ve now implemented the hack and it works very well. Thanks guys.

Time Machine is easily my favourite Leopard feature. For the first time I have a regular, automatic backup routine that runs in the background and never confronts me with annoying dialogue boxes whinging about how it was unable to back up my data (that’s you Retrospect, that is). Add to that the ease with which files and data within can be restored and the fact that individual files and folders can be accessed from the Finder and I can forgive it that clumsy ‘travelling through space’ graphical metaphor. Well almost.

There’s one piece missing from the Time Machine jigsaw, though: the ability to boot directly from a Time Machine volume when your boot drive fails. There is a workaround as this tip on MacOSX Hints details. And it involves nothing more complicated than performing a Restore from your original install disc onto a fresh volume and then using that as your Time Machine volume.

Great as that trick is though, it’s not as neat as the Time Machine features in the just-released update to SuperDuper, v2.5. According to developer, Shirt Pocket Software, SuperDuper 2.5 lets you store bootable Leopard back-ups on your Time Machine volume, making that volume bootable, and

“copy your Time Machine backups to other disks, so you can back them up or upgrade to a larger disk without losing your history.”

Lovely.

For more Mac OS X tips, hop to the Tips page. And if you haven’t done so already, subscribe now. I’ve made it as easy as I can, just click whichever of the buttons on the right makes most sense to you.

No matter how fast your Mac was on the day you unwrapped it and took it from its box for the first time, it’s almost certain to be running much more slowly now. If you’re like me, your reaction to the delays in opening applications, downloading email, and sometimes even just typing will range from a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders to a full-blown fit of rage, depending on your patience levels at the time.

Of course, you could spend money upgrading RAM, adding a new hard drive, or even treating yourself to a new graphics card – if you have a Power Mac or Mac Pro. You can, however, give your Mac a boost much more easily, and for free. Here we list the top five ways to turbo boost your Mac for free.

1. Free-up some space. Mac OS X’s virtual memory is a demanding beast. And to feed it, you need to keep at least 15% of your hard disk free. Do this by; emptying the Trash, in the Finder and in applications like iMovie and iPhoto; deleting unwanted applications – AppDelete is free and works a treat; removing language support files for languages you don’t need – use Delocalizer for this, it still works despite not having been updated for five years.

2. Clear your desktop and keep open windows to a minimum. Every icon on your desktop uses system memory and every open window uses processor cycles. So keep them to the minimum to optimise your Mac’s performance.

3. Log out other users. Mac OS X’s Fast User Switching feature is great but having multiple users logged in at the same time consumes system resources, so if your Mac is running slowly, make sure you’re the only user logged in.

4. Keep Spotlight in check. Spotlight periodically indexes every volume mounted on your Mac, unless you tell it not to. Indexing uses resources and can slow down your Mac. So to improve performance add volumes you don’t need indexed, such as back-up drives or scratch disks, to Spotlight’s privacy list in the Spotlight System Preferences pane.

5. Do routine maintenance. Versions of Mac OS X before 10.4 ran regular maintenance scripts in the middle of the night. So if you turn your Mac off every night, they won’t run. The solution is to run them manually. Brian Hill’s MacJanitor allows you to do this for free. There’s a new system for running maintenance scripts in Mac OS X Tiger so they don’t run in the middle of the night. However it’s buggy and so it is still worthwhile downloading and running MacJanitor.

This post has been entered in ProBlogger’s Top Five competition. Click the link and check it out.

I’m a bit behind with my RSS feed skimming, so I’ve only just noticed that Merlin posted these great Mail tips for creating super-useful Smart Mailboxes.

Merlin, they rock

I use Mac OS X Mail for all my email; work and home. Everything. I’m also very disorganised. The result is an Inbox with close-on 12000 messages in it, many with chunky attachments. This has a huge slowdown effect, not just on Mail itself, but on my Mac as a whole: each message is indexed by Spotlight, for example. So I decided that it was time to do something about it, and figured that, in the spirit of sharing, I’d document it here.

So, here are my top three tips for boosting Mac OS X Mail performance.

1. Get rid of attachments. Attachments that you need or want to keep should have been saved elsewhere by now. Chances are that if you haven’t saved them, you don’t need them. So its time to get rid. Starting with your Inbox, then going through each folder, select every message and go to the Message menu and select Remove attachments. This may take a while if you have as many messages as I do, so go and make a coffee.

2. Archive old messages to a webmail account. I use Gmail, which provides 2GB of storage per account. Set up an account especially for your Mail archive. Then go to Mail/Preferences. Select the Rules pane and select Add Rule. Write a description of your rule in the description window and set the rule to say ‘If any of these conditions are met: Date Received is Greater Than xx days old’ where xx is the number of days back you want to go to archive. eg to archive everything older than a year, xx should be 365. Then under Perform the Following Actions:’ select ‘Redirect Message to’ and in the box type your Gmail address.

3. Archiving to a webmail account is great, but you should also archive somewhere local. To do this go to the Library folder in your user folder and drag the Mail folder to an external hard disk. Now go back to the Rules pane and add an action to the rule created in 2. Select ‘Delete Message’ and click ok. Make sure the rule is ticked. Quit Mail and re-open it. The rule will run and from now on you’ll never have any messages older than the period you selected in the rule. Periodically archive your Mail folder to the hard disk you used in Step 3.

And if that’s not enough, here’s a bonus tip. Before opening Mail again after quitting, go to Library/Mail and drag the Envelope Index to your desktop. This will force MaIl to rebuild its index when you re-open it, which should speed it up a bit more.

Mac OS X is a hugely powerful beast and most of us rarely do more than scratch the surface. In an attempt to force myself to dig deeper under the hood, and help you get more from OS X, I thought it would be fun every now and again to take a look at some of its most under-used features.

Today it’s the turn of Keychain Access, a handy little app that lives in the Utilities folder inside Applications. Keychain Access is a management tool for Keychain, Mac OS X’s repository for passwords, permissions and security information. It stores the security information you need to open encrypted disk images and to log on to email servers, Web servers and FTP servers. And it allows you to store your security information and protect it using the Triple Digital Encryption Standard (3DES).

There are two main reasons for using Keychain Access; to access passwords that you’ve forgotten and to store other security inofrmation such as PINs and credit card numbers.

To view a password you’ve forgotten, launch Keychain Access by navigating to the Utilities folder (hint: Command-Shift-U in the Finder will take you there) and double-clicking on its icon. In the main window you’ll see a list of items for which your Keychain has stored passwords. Find the item whose password you’ve forgotten, either by scrolling through the list or searching for it in the search box on the top right of the window. Double-click the item and check the Show Password box in the dialog that opens. You’ll then be prompted to enter your Keychain password (it’s the same as your log in password). And the password will be displayed.

To add an item such as a credit card number, go to the File menu and select New Secure Note Item or New Password Item.

To control whether your Keychain unlocks when you log in or whether it locks when your Mac sleeps and to select if it synchronises with your .mac account, go to Preferences and select the First Aid tab. Check or uncheck the appropriate boxes.