The Data Detectors feature in Apple Mail always surprises me. It's one of those features that works far better than I ever expect it to. For example, given this email…
![Please reserve Sunday 15th March on your calendar from 15:00 for a chess game or two, a couple of drinks & tucker. The address is 2[Censored] Beverly Hills, which is 5 minutes walk from Beverly Hills railway station & King Georges Road.](http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/pictures/data-detector-email.png)
…the data detector successfully pulls out the date, time and location without any further input from me. (The event title is the email subject, which is usually close enough).
Well done, nameless hacker in the depths of the Apple campus.
I had the same thing happen to me recently within my yahoo mail account... I clicked on the date and a new calendar appointment magically appeared. It's amazing what technology can do these days.
I remember a friend of mine trying this back in 1984. He was interested in extracting genealogical data, but started by detecting dates, names, ages, addresses, relationship tags and the like. He showed a pretty neat little application which could update genealogies, address books and a few other tricks based on emails and general text. I don't think he ever released it anywhere. It was one of those hobby things.
I noticed Apple Mail doing this data recognition and was sure that some people would like it. I find it useless. iCal has such a bad interface I'd rather use a raw text file in a simple text editor for my calendar. It is easier to use, has a better data display and has more powerful features. I haven't figured out how to turn this feature off, but I have mastered the UI tricks so I can still cut and paste stuff.
This nameless hacker in the deep dungeons of Apple was unfortunately unaware of all other date formats like those used by Germans.
Bad case of English language chauvinism. :-/