Return of the widescreen Mail

Posted Nov. 5, ’07, 8:14 AM PT by Dan Moren

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One of the casualties of Leopard were a number of pieces of software that extend the functionality of Mail.app. Among those was a personal favorite of mine, a plugin called Letterbox that allowed you to view your mailbox in a widescreen format: rather than putting the message list and preview panes stacked horizontally, it turned them into vertical columns. Extremely useful if you’re more interested in reading longer messages without having to scroll, as well as wanting to see a longer history of your mailbox (and, with almost 12,000 messages in my mailbox, I find that pretty useful).

Letterbox hasn’t been updated for Leopard yet—developer Aaron Harnly is still working on it—but to tide you over in the meantime, Dane Harnett has concocted a replacement called, appropriately, WidescreenMailPlugin. Restoring widescreen view to your mailbox will require a couple of Terminal commands (you can copy and paste them from the plugin’s Read Me file). It seems to work fine (though one tip: if you’re using GrowlMail, you’ll want to manually remove it from /Library/Mail/Bundles, or it’ll just crash Mail every time).

I do have one question for Mr. Harnett, though: Letterbox weighed in at a rather svelte 148k whereas WidescreenMailPlugin is a hefty 16.1MB. What the heck’s going on there?

[via Hawk Wings]