Take Control of Apple Mail in Lion

Learn the basics and go under the hood with Mail in Lion!

Are you using Apple Mail in Lion effectively? In this book, email expert Joe Kissell provides the comprehensive guidance you need. Perhaps you want to fully understand the basics of receiving, composing, and sending email. Or maybe you want to master many advanced options—including account setup, employing multiple accounts, formatting, rules, smart mailboxes, and iCloud or Gmail integration. Either way, you'll find helpful advice and detailed steps, based on extensive real-world experience. You'll also find tips on various third-party add-ons that make Mail smarter and more enjoyable to use.

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This book will teach you to:

Comprehend account options: Understand the difference between POP and IMAP, plus learn about special aspects of iCloud, Exchange, and Gmail accounts. Discover how to integrate all these types of accounts, and more, into your overall Mail setup, as well as learn how you can manage Gmail’s labels in an IMAP environment.

Read: Learn efficient ways to quickly open, read, process, and file your messages. See how best to use Lion’s three-pane view (or turn it off if you prefer), and how to follow email threads and conversations. You'll also get tips for handling incoming attachments, flagging messages, avoiding spam, and using Mail's built-in RSS feed reader.

Write and send: Read about different methods for quickly addressing your email, how to take control of the From, To, Cc, and Bcc lines, and how to create multiple signatures. Find out how to address a single message to a group of recipients, and how to decide whether you should use digital signatures or encryption, plus what to do when you want to send a digitally signed or encrypted message. And, get advice about formatting an email message—and why you might not want to, plus learn how to include URLs, add attachments, and include quoted text from other messages.

Find your stuff: Keep Mail organized with advice on how to arrange Mail's sidebar, Favorites bar, and your various mailboxes so you can easily locate messages using a variety of techniques—including search tokens and Boolean expressions. Joe covers simple features, such as making a new mailbox and rearranging your mailboxes, as well as advanced techniques, such as creating rules and smart mailboxes.

Use Notes: Mail has a Notes feature for leaving yourself reminders. Learn the strengths and limitations of Notes, and make it work for you.

Unravel Mail mysteries: Understand the sometimes-present Outbox, sort out the Dock unread count, learn why smart addresses can be stupid, avoid "unsafe" addresses, manage the Previous Recipients list, wrangle attachments, and determine why certain mailboxes appear in particular categories on Mail's sidebar.

Avoid and fix problems: Get advice on how to back up your email, and find out how to restore it from a backup. Also read the dozen pages of hard-won troubleshooting advice with tips on managing a misbehaving mailbox, fixing sending problems and delays, resolving connection errors, and more.

Book Info

147 pages
Version 1.0
Published Jun 06, 2012
1.6 MB download
ISBN: 9781615424078
Free sample with Table of Contents, Intro, Quick Start, and section starts.

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About the Author

Kissell, Joe headshot Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS and a Senior Contributor to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.

Book Reviews

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Author Interviews

Read Me First
Introduction
Quick Start to Controlling Apple Mail
Learn What’s New in Lion Mail
Learn about Email Protocols
Set Up Your Accounts
Read Incoming Messages
Read RSS Feeds
Address Addressing
Compose and Send Messages
Sign and Encrypt Messages
Manage Your Mailboxes
Keep Track of Notes
Find Your Messages
Automate Mail with Rules
Fix Mail Problems
Back Up and Restore Your Email
About This Book

Read Me First

Mail, Apple’s full-featured email application, is the most popular way for Mac OS X users to send and receive email. This book helps you get more out of Mail by explaining its most important features, providing useful tips, and solving problems. This book was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Michael E. Cohen, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Introduction

This book is the fifth in my series of titles about using Apple Mail, stretching back to the version included with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (which I wrote about in 2004) and continuing with coverage of Mail in Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and now, Mail version 5.x in Lion. After all those versions of Mail, all I can say is, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Mail is still my favorite email program—and believe me, I’ve tried them all. Yet it remains far from perfect. Certain aspects of Mail’s operation continue to be nearly inscrutable, and sometimes internally contradictory. Problems that have been around for nearly a decade are still there, and new ones have materialized. Features have appeared and disappeared over the years without warning or explanation.

But worst of all, in my opinion, is that Apple’s documentation on Mail is still, in typical Apple style, appallingly inadequate. Mail has no instruction manual as such, just the basic guidance you can find when you choose Help > Mail Help. In fairness, Mail Help contains lots of useful information, but it still barely scratches the surface of Mail’s capabilities. Dozens of features aren’t mentioned at all, and much of the information there is sketchy. Nearly every time I consult Mail Help, I find that it leaves me with more questions than answers. Based on the hundreds of messages I’ve received from confused Mail users over the years, I’m not alone!

I’ve had to figure out a lot of things in Mail by trial and error—but you shouldn’t have to. My goal in this book is to provide clear, helpful explanations of how to perform the most important tasks in Mail. But more than that, I want you to understand why things work the way they do, how to avoid or work around Mail’s limitations, and how to approach Mail in the most effective way.

Quick Start to Controlling Apple Mail

Manage Mail setup:

Start on the right foot as you Learn What’s New in Lion Mail and Learn about Email Protocols.
Get Mail up and running in Set Up Your Accounts.

Read email:

Get mail into your Inbox; then sort it, read it, and work with it. See Read Incoming Messages.
View RSS posts in Mail. See Read RSS Feeds.

Create email:

Make sure your messages reach the right destinations by reading Address Addressing.
Get your message across with style (or even with plain text!). Read Compose and Send Messages.
Send private information safely. Read Sign and Encrypt Messages.

Get organized:

Understand and use the organizational tools Mail provides. See Manage Your Mailboxes.
Use Mail to store notes and other snippets. See Keep Track of Notes.
Find any message in a jiffy. See Find Your Messages.
Let Mail do tedious filing and sorting for you! See Automate Mail with Rules.

Make Mail work better:

Having problems sending, receiving, or searching email? Find a solution in Fix Mail Problems.
Make sure you don’t lose your valuable email. Learn how to Back Up and Restore Your Email.

What’s New in This Edition and in Apple Mail 5

In this edition, I cover the numerous new features found in the Lion version of Mail (Mail 5.x). You can see a list of those features a few pages ahead, in Learn What’s New in Lion Mail. In addition to those Lion-specific features, I added quite a bit of new material that the previous edition, Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard, doesn’t have, including:

iCloud: In addition to adding information about using iCloud throughout the book, I’ve deleted all references to MobileMe, scheduled for discontinuation on June 30, 2012.
Mail, Contacts & Calendars: This new preference pane provides a system-wide place for configuring accounts, including those for email. See the sidebar Mail, Contacts & Calendars Preference Pane.
Gmail: I’ve significantly updated and improved the instructions for working with Gmail accounts. See Use IMAP with Gmail.
Keyboard shortcuts: I clarified the instructions for assigning keyboard shortcuts to commands on the Move To and Copy To submenus. See File and Organize Messages.
Message links: A new sidebar tells you why and how to Link to a Specific Mail Message.
Spam: I expanded the discussion of how to Stop Spam to include, among other things, information on server-side filtering.
From address: The topic Choose an Account or Address to Send From now provides more information on determining which address your messages will be sent from.
Priority: I briefly cover how to Set Message Priority for outgoing mail.
Quoting: I offer a more finessed discussion of quoting in replies in the sidebar Quote Effectively.
Special mailboxes: The discussion of Special Mailboxes now talks about unified mailboxes as well as how to find “phantom” mailboxes.
Searching: Besides talking about searching for messages, I briefly discuss how to Search within the Current Message.
Backups: A new option you might consider is using a cloud-based email backup service. See Do a Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.
Mountain Lion: Previews of upcoming Mail features that Apple has announced for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion are presented in notes like this:

Coming in Mountain Lion: Mail in OS X 10.8 will feature unicorns and rainbows.

Learn What’s New in Lion Mail

The version of Mail included with Lion (5.x) looks similar to the version that shipped with Snow Leopard, but it includes many changes. Among them are these:

Support for additional account types: Mail could already connect to Gmail accounts via POP or IMAP, but now it recognizes Gmail accounts automatically, allowing you to set them up for IMAP access with fewer steps than before. Mail in Lion also supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 accounts. And email accounts can now be set up not only within Mail but also in the Mail, Contacts, & Calendars pane of System Preferences. See Set Up Your Accounts, and especially notice the sidebar Mail, Contacts & Calendars Preference Pane.
New layout: By default, Mail now uses a new three-column layout that looks similar to Mail on an iPad. You can revert to the old layout if the new one doesn’t strike your fancy. See The Viewer Window.
Favorites bar: The new Favorites bar gives you quick access to frequently used mailboxes and notes, each of which has its own keyboard shortcut. Once again, see The Viewer Window.
Format bar: When composing rich text (HTML) messages, you can now display an extra toolbar that gives you faster access to common formatting controls. See Tips for Rich Text Messages.
Conversations: Although Mail previously included an Organize By Thread option to group messages from the same conversation together, in Lion this capability is greatly refined and enhanced. See Follow Conversations.
More message flags: Instead of a mere binary switch (flagged or unflagged), you can now mark messages with any of seven different colored flags, which you can both rename to suit your needs and use in searches and smart mailboxes. See Work with Message Flags.
An Archive command: If you want a simple way to get messages out of your Inbox without deleting them or having to choose a specific destination, the new Archive command may be what you’re looking for. See File and Organize Messages.
Better searching: The Lion version of Mail adds search tokens, Boolean searches, and other new tools for finding messages. See Find Your Messages.
No more to do items: Yes, a feature also disappeared—to do items are no longer part of Mail in Lion.

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