Making Mail.app look like Outlook or Thunderbird

I don’t know why, but Apple didn’t give users the ability to customize the view of their OS freebie email app Mail. Anybody who has used the latest Outlook (as of this writing) or the excellent open source Thunderbird has seen the beauty of a 3-column email view.

Over on the Ars Technica forums, there is a thread about Mail and widescreen displays. A talented developer ran with it and the result is Letterbox, a sweet plug-in that gives users a 3 column view.

Even if you just have a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution, the three–column view is nice for reading more of the message. The subject lines get squished, so shrink the message list font to 9 and get even more info on the page. Plus, it’s nice to be able to read the whole message.

Thanks to Merlin Mann and his flickr stream for showing me this awesome plug-in. o