We got special characters available via the Mac OS X system fonts, why not use them on mailbox folder? Using the Character Viewer menu item, we can quickly browse all these icons and insert them into any working document. This includes mailbox names in Mail. This should work in other mail clients as well.

Here’s a quick visual guide to pimping folders in Mail.

Step 1: Enable the Character Viewer menu item.

Select Language and Text in your System Preferences. This is found under the apple menu.

Under the Input Sources, select Keyboard & Character Viewer. This will enable the pull down menu item in your main menu.

Step 2: Look up and insert character.

In your Mail application, select the mailbox in place with one click to go into edit mode.

From your to main menu, Select Show Character Viewer from Character & Keyboard menu item.

Browse the available Symbols and find the one you want. Double clicking it will place the character in the Mail app.

Conclusion

These icons give a quick visual clue about to what they do. And help maintain my zero inbox goal. I’m following Merlin Mann’s oldie but goodie tip called Inbox Makeover. Make sure you check out his new upcoming book about it Inbox Zero.

Multiple Languages is a feature in Leopard most people don’t know about. Having access to this is great but it can be rather tedious  to switch your spellchecker back and forth between multiple languages. Leopard introduced a Multilingual feature that makes the spellchecker check against multiple languages instead of just one.

To enable Multilingual Spell Checker:

From most applications like Safari or Mail, go to the top menu and select ‘Edit > Spelling and Grammar >  Show Spelling and Grammar’. From the Spelling window, change the pulldown menu to Multilingual and click Change. 

To enable the Character Palette:

The Character Palette gives a quick access to all special characters like accents icons.

From the Apple in the menu bar, select ‘System Preferences’ and go to the International Preference Pane. 

From the International System Preference Pane, select the Input Menu tab and check mark the option to show the input menu in the menu bar. 

You should now see the flag of your country on your menu bar. Whenever you need to look up an accent or special character, just go to the flag and select ‘Show Character Palette.