There are a few Mail.app features and plugins that make this application much more usable to me. Many of them are hidden. So let me list them here for yours (and my future) information.
- Smart folders are your friend: Especially the hint Emulate Gmail's conversations in Mail.app helped me a lot to have a better overview of my mailbox. I also have a smart folder with all unread messages (to get a quick overview over new mailinglist messages) and one with all flagged messages (to remind me of to-do items)
- Keyboard shortcuts for jumping to top and bottom of message list. This is a serious design flaw in Mail.app because it doesn't behave like I usually expect it on Mac. But thanks to this hint I know the solution: Press Option+Up (or Option+Down) for one second. Also Option+Up/Down (without waiting one second) jump to the previous/next related message.
- Use Mail Act-On to get keyboard shortcuts for some actions (e.g. moving a message into a specific folder)
- Use rules. The ones I use are
- Marking spam as read (so Mail.app doesn't notify me about new spam in the dock icon)
- Mark people from my address bock with a color in mailing lists. This doesn't have any real use but I find it interesting to quickly spot new messages by known people. And I do sometimes add people who provide very good information on a list into my address bock.
- And of course I move mail for different mailing lists into different folders
- I also have the following extensions installed:
- Mail Type Select to quickly select messages by keyboard.
- GPGMail for GPG support in Mail.app (unfortunately rarely used because not many people use GPG/PGP)
This list may get updated if I find new stuff.
Update 01:33 Document the plugins GPGMail and Mail Type Select