Indev Software has released Mail Act-On 2.17 (http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html), an update of the enhancement to Apple’s Mail application that lets you create rules to perform actions on messages by responding to simple keystrokes. The upgrade adds preliminary support for saving /reading Act-On and Outbox rules to/from a drop box folder or shared network folder.

To use an alternate folder, use the following terminal command. defaults write ca.indev.MailActOn ruleSavePath “Path/to/dropbox” Note: This won’t work with inbox rules because of potential sync problems with MobileMe.

Other new features include the use of preferred mailboxes when moving messages, and the ability for organizational rules to activate other rules to enable sophisticated workflows such as automatically filing messages that you have replied to, and using combined And/Or logic in your rules. There are also other enhancements and bug fixes.

Mail Act-On 2.1.7 is a free update for registered users. For new users the cost is US$24.95. A demo is available for download.