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Making mailing lists nicer: Writing a mail extension for macOS with MailKit

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As a developer, I need to work with mailing lists a lot. Developer-focused mailing lists tend to have certain conventions most usage of email has moved on from, as have the clients. While some people who trawl mailing lists configure some terminal email client, I tend to not like those. Most of the time, I use the stock Apple mail application (Mail.app). It otherwise works well and has platform integration.

However, I do want to avoid a lot of common mailing list faux pas, like top posting and not wrapping lines. Mail.app can write plain text emails, but it doesn’t push you in the right direction for mailing lists. However, Mail.app does provide an extension API. I figured I could write an extension to make my life on mailing lists easier. Turns out it’s possible!

The extension I wrote is called MailTools (tentative until a better name is found). Feel free to build or download it yourself; this article explains the challenges I faced.

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Can’t add email accounts in macOS (stuck on final step)

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When I tried to add an Exchange account (but it seemed to affect IMAP accounts too) in macOS (I was running High Sierra, but it affects other versions too), from either the Internet Accounts preference pane or Mail.app, it would let would let me add an account right until the final step where it asks what kind of services you want enabled on the account, then the Done/Next button just does nothing. You might get a throbber for a second, but it subsides and does nothing.

There’s a lot of somewhat convulted steps posted on the internet, but the simplest is to just reset your keychain from the Keychain Access application (Application Menu->Preferences, it’s one of the options there) and reboot. You’ll have to enter your passwords again (including iCloud), but I had no trouble adding mail accounts after that.