I’m happy to announce the availability of MsgFiler, a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly files emails into existing mailbox folders. MsgFiler’s fast searching means you just have to type a few characters to find the right mailbox. Move selected messages with a click or open a mailbox without having to navigate the mailbox folder pane. MsgFiler is optimized for keyboard-only usage, perfect for Apple Mail power users.
I’ve been testing MsgFiler for some time now, and it’s made cleaning up my Inbox and organizing my mail much easier. If you want to get a handle on organizing your emails, MsgFiler is the app for you! For a limited time, the app is available for a low introductory price of US$8. Payment is easy and fast through PayPal or Kagi!
You can check out MsgFiler in action by watching the short video tutorial below:
MsgFiler is inspired by QuickFile, a plug-in for Mozilla Thunderbird by Paul Tomlin. Big thanks go out to Alex King for the initial encouragement to write MsgFiler and for his countless feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to Paul Guyot for his Cocoa tips.
tow.com 
Great job Adam, I’ve posted my endorsement here:
http://alexking.org/blog/2006/11/15/msgfiler
I’m tempted to buy a license right away, Adam. MsgFiler seems to be one of the few effective impulse buys for me, as was BuddyPop. However, I’m frustrated that it appears in the Dock when I activate it. I feel that plugins are better faceless applications. If you can’t make it load as a more integrated part of Mail, can you at least help me prevent it from showing up in the Dock? I’ve tried using the usual NSUIElement and LSUIElement tags in the bundle’s Info.plist but to no avail. What do you think?
MsgFiler is a combination Mail Plug-in written in Cocoa/Obj-C and an AppleScript Studio Application. One of the long-term goals is to convert MsgFiler into a pure Cocoa app, which would make the integration with Apple Mail more seamless.
In the meantime, you can modify the NSUIElement tag in the Info.plist of the MsgFiler application, not the mail plug-in bundle. It’s located in:
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/MsgFilerPlugIn.mailbundle/Contents/Resources/MsgFiler.app/Contents/Info.plist
After watching your tutorial movie on your site I find MsgFiler cool enough to buy it, so I decided to give it a try. Unfortunatelly there is the following show stopper usability issue for me in it:
I’m a Hungarian user, so I have a lot of mailboxes in Mail.app that contain special Hungarian accented characters (e.g. Ã,é,á,ű,Å‘,ú,ö,ü,ó and Ã,É,Ã,Å°,Å,Ú,Ö,Ãœ,Ó – I hope these Unicode characters will appear correctly in the comments after posting) in their names. MsgFiler seems to be problematic to find mailbox names that contain any of these characters.
If you have a chance try to make these two mailboxes for testing purpose:
– Szabó
РSz̩ki
[1] When typing “Szabó” or “Széki” into the search field of the MsgFiler, there will be no matches at all.
[2] When the accented character is on the end of the word, it can be found by typing the unaccented version into the search field. So, when you type “Szabo”, the “Szabó” mailbox will be appear on mailbox list in the MsgFiler’s window.
[3] When the accented character is in the middle of the word, it can’t be found via typing the unaccented version of character into the search field. So, when you type “Szeki” or “Sze”, the “Széki” mailbox won’t appear in the results window.
I don’t know, maybe this is a result of MsgFiler being a Cocoa/Obj-C and AppleScript Studio application. (AppleScript is well known about its buggyness regarding Unicode character handling.) Maybe it is not related to this and you can fix this problem in one of your next releases somehow.
If you can fix this issue, then I will buy your plugin at once. But until then unfortunately it is useless for me.
Mike – Thanks for the heads-up on this issue. I’ll be taking a look at it!
Can I change the shortcut key?
Hi Adam – this looks great, but I’m one of those people getting the -1700 error message. I’m on a MacBook, not a Pro.
Nice App.
Maybe you would consider enhancing along these lines:
Its built on the concept we developed in EOS (later IBM PROFS) when I worked at Amoco (now BP). The concept allows for a FC, or File Copy, to be entered in the email address pane. If nothing entered it defaults to the Sent mail folder. This FC concept is especially useful if I’m working on a number of projects with different communities of interest.
It obviates the extra step of filing out going correspondence by processing the sent mail folder.
There some other behaviours of FC, which I you’re interested, I can share. Look forward to hearing from you.
Bad news – for some reason installing MsgFiler blows away my MailTags preferences. I’ve reproduced this on three machines.
Neil – I’ll check this out by installing MailTags on my system. Thanks for the heads up.
MsgFiler looks great but it does not work at all for me. I first ran the installer (no error messages); but no luck (that is: I do not get the ‘Move with MsgFiler’ menu item in the Message menu, nor does cmd-9 do anything except beep). So I tried the manual installation including the 2 “defaults write…” bits; still no luck.
I have 2 other Mail plugins (OMiC and AttachmentScannerPlugin); I was hoping maybe there was just some conflict, so I removed those (leaving MsgFiler) but still no luck.
10.4.8, Mail 2.1 (752/752.2), PowerBook G4
Josh – Thanks for the email. I’ve added your bug report to the queue. Hopefully, I’ll be able to resolve these issues in the next release. I’ll be doing more compatibility testing with other mail plug-ins.
Sounds good. One thing as a folow-up: I noticed that at least part of the problem may be in Permissions and folder structure. For example, I think the actual plugin (inside the bundle/Contents/MacOS/ did not have x permissions. And there was no PkgInfo file — basically it was not being recognized as a .mailbundle at all. But, even after playing around and fixing that stuff up, I could not get it working :-(
Hi Adam/ Neil
The blowing away prefs could be a MailTags 2.0 beta issue — I am still looking it it.
Scott
Installed MsgFiler and it’s working great, thanks for a great program, well worth the $8. One enhancement i would suggest – and it’s almost for another package altogether, but it seems to me to go hand-in-hand with Filer. It would be great if one could use a shortcut like CMD-0 (next to 9), and bring up the same kind of box but that would, with the same kind of auto-complete ease, OPEN a mailbox (local or IMAP), saving the time one spends mousing over, opening a folder, and if necessary subfolders, then clicking. Thanks!
fogboy – You can actually do this with MsgFiler. Just click on the Show button or press Command-O when a mailbox is selected. MsgFiler will then open the mailbox in the Mail app.
1. um, oops. rtfm, fogboy.
2. sheeeeet this is great! thanks.
The installer doesn’t work for me. I get the message “Note: Before using MsgFiler, you must quit and restart Mail.” No matter what I do I always get the error message: Can’t get > of alias “barry:Library:Application Support:”. I haven’t yet tried to install it manually. OSX 10.4.8, Mail 2.1.1 (752.3)
Whoops! The ampersands in your web posting stuff don’t get escaped. That message is “Can’t get <<class ctnr>> of alias…