Tracking package shipments is fast and easy in Mac OSX Lion thanks to the advanced integration of Apple Mail and its core WebKit browser.

Order shipments are almost always summarized in an email confirmation message from the seller. If there’s a tracking number in the email body from FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service, the Lion Apple Mail application will recognize the number and highlight it with a dotted rectangle. Just roll your cursor over the tracking number and a dashed rectangle will appear. Click on the down arrow to reveal the Shipment Tracking option. Apple Mail will figure out the correct shipping company tracking page and display it in a large popup window without ever opening a new browser window in Safari. Very efficient!

Note:  Some people find these data detectors in Mail annoying. If you want to turn them off all together, just open up the Terminal application and copy and paste the command below and press Enter. To turn the detectors back on, just do the same except change the YES to a NO.

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES