Do you use Apple’s Mail application on your Mac? It’s a capable email application and one of its best features is that its abilities can be extended using plug-ins. These plug-ins let you customize Mail so it can better meet your preferences and needs. Here’s a list of 10 plug-ins for Mail that’ll let you increase your productivity.

MsgFiler lets you quickly file email messages into one of your existing Mailboxes (aka folders). Using either a menu command or a keyboard shortcut you can file a message into a folder. Simply type the first few characters of the mailbox’s name and select the desired mailbox from the list of matches.

GrowlMail temporarily displays a small notification window on your screen every time a new email message arrives. By glancing at this notification you can monitor your Inbox while you’re working in another application.

SpamSieve offers better spam protection then Mail’s built-in junk mail filter. It accomplishes this by using Bayesian filtering methods. It require some initial training, but it’s very effective.

MailAct-On is an incredibly robust plug-in which lets you use keyboard shortcuts to quickly file, label or flag incoming or outgoing mail messages. That is an over-simplified description of its capabilities. This video introduction http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn_files/Virtual%20Tour.mov and video review http://media.macworld.com/media/vodcast/mwvodcast75.mp4 will give you a more complete understanding of it’s capabilities.

MailTags  let’s you assign keywords, priorities, categories and due dates to actions mentioned in an email. It lets you escape the constraints of folders by allowing you to organize and find your messages by keyword or other metadata that you’ve assigned. Made by the same developers, Mail Act-On and MailTags can be used together or separately.

WideMail reconfigures Mail’s layout. It moves the message preview area from below the list of messages to the right of it. This layout uses your screen’s space more efficiently. Apple realized this layout was very popular so they made it the standard layout in version 5.0 of Mail which comes with Lion, Mac OS X 10.7

Attachment Tamer gives you control over Mail’s handling of attachments that you send. Be default, Mail will display an attachment, such as an image, in the body of the email that you’re composing. Attachment Tamer lets you change this behavior and send the image as a regular attachment instead.

MessageFont  lets you set Mail’s default font when you reply to or compose a new email message. Mail’s preferences appears to let you set the default font, but this affects only what you see, not what the recipient sees. MessageFont changes which font is seen by the recipient.

MissingAttachments scans an email message and notifies you if you have referred to an attachment, but forgotten to attach a file. Unfortunately this plug in hasn’t been updated to work with recent versions of Mail.

MailUnreadStatusBar displays an icon to the upper right corner of your screen which lists the number of unread email messages you have. You can customize it to track multiple folders. Its icon then displays a menu listing the unread message count for each selected folder and lets you go directly to any of the listed folders.

In my opinion, these are some of the best plug-ins for Mail, but you can read about dozens more at the Hawk Wings web site.

Dealing with spam or junk email in your Inbox is a waste of time. If you run a small business the time wasted identifying and deleting email can add up over weeks or months whether you are a one-person or multi-person team. Here are a couple of ways to reduce the amount of spam that you receive in your email Inbox.

First, make sure that your email provider’s email filtering feature is turned on. Almost every email provider has such a feature, but many of them are not very capable.

Next, you might consider setting up your own spam filtering application. For Mac users, I recommend SpamSieve. You can try it and if you find it effective then buy it for $30. It works with the most common email client applications including Mail, Entourage, Eudora and Thunderbird. This is a good solution for individuals.

If you own your own domain name and have a small workgroup then you might consider signing up for a email filtering service such as Big Mountain Hosting’s MailFoundry spam filtering service. In order to set this up you need to modify the MX (mail exchange) record within your DNS (domain name system) records. Specifically, you set your MX record to deliver all incoming email to the email filtering server. The server then scans all email messages and delivers legitimate email messages to your Inbox. All email messages that were identified as spam or contain a virus are put into a quarantine. You then receive one email that lists all quarantined messages. If a legitimate email was quarantined then you can  click a button to release the message from its quarantine and have it delivered to your Inbox.
I use Big Mountain’s spam filerting server and find it highly effective. Their plans start at $10/month for up to 5 users. They have tiered pricing for larger groups of users.