How To Make Postbox Email Client Look More Like Gmail

I love Postbox and now it slowly became my default email client for MacOSX. The reasons are many and you can find some of them in this post (and actually in this one, too).

What I don’t like, though, is the very ugly icon used as “flag” or “star”, that is the icon we use to see as a big star on Gmail. On Thunderbird (from which Postbox derives) that icon is actually a big yellow star and it is eye-catching enough to make important “starred” emails stand out, while in Postbox it is a “to-do checkbox”-like grey and almost invisible icon.

I asked them to change that icon a lot of times or, at least, to make users choose. Not getting any response (or, at least, nothing that could make us expect a change soon), I tried to do that by myself. After having studied Postbox’s files, I found out where those icons where located. Then I downloaded the star icons from this page (flaggedmail.png, flagcol.png) and updated that file.

Here are the detailed instructions for MacOSX (do them in the right order and at your own risk), elapsed time five to ten minutes:

1) Make sure Postbox is not running. Go to Documents and create a new empty folder called, for example, PostboxStarIcon. Download the two icons above into this folder.

2) In Finder, open the Applications folder

3) click on “Postbox”, right click and choose “Show package content”

4) open the folder Contents/MacOS/Chrome

5) click on Classic.jar, right click, “Copy” (it is a compressed file where the icons are stored)

6) go to the new empty folder created in (1)

7) right-click and choose “Paste”

rename the file classic.jar into classic.zip (useful to de-compress it easily)

9) unzip it (double-click should be enough)

10) you will now have a folder called “classic”. Enter this folder and right-click on the “skin” folder then choose the contextual menu command “Copy”

11) exit from the folder Classic and paste the “Skin” folder. You can now delete the folder “Classic” from your temporary PostboxStarIcon folder.

12) Now, and this is important, highlight the two icons you previously downloaded into PostboxStarIcon, right-click and choose “Copy”.

13) Enter the folder “Skin/Classic/Messenger/Icons” and paste the two icons there (replace the old, UGLY ones)

14) Now the cool part: open the Terminal and go to the folder PostboxStarIcon (through Linux commands or through some little utilities you can find here)

15) now execute the following commands:

jar uf classic.jar skin/classic/messenger/icons/flaggedmail.png

jar uf classic.jar skin/classic/messenger/icons/flagcol.png

Run Postbox and you’ll find the new, bright, Gmail-like icons

Tagged as: postbox