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by Joe Kissell

Ebook: $15.00

• More Info
• Contents & Intro
• What’s New
• FAQ
• Blog

Join Joe as you become confident with how 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. Build your know-how of Mountain Lion's new VIP options for identifying important messages and take control of which messages appear as notifications. See how best to use 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: Discover different methods for quickly addressing your email; how to handle 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, attachments, and 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.

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.

Introduction

Every time Apple updates OS X to a major new version, one of the first things I do is open Mail and choose Help > What’s New in Mail? to find out what features have changed since the last big release. This time, for Mail version 6.x in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, that window shows just three changes: VIP senders, notifications for new messages, and sharing Web pages in different formats. My initial reaction was, “Wow, that’s not much of a change.” But then, as I began poking around, my reaction changed to, “Hey, wait a minute—why didn’t Apple mention _this_…and this and this?” I quickly found several other important differences from the Lion version of Mail.

This has been Apple’s way for years: Change things but don’t mention what has changed or why. Add features, remove features, make things work differently—but don’t publish release notes or call attention to changes, even if it means confusing users who have been used to doing something a certain way for a very long time. I realize Apple is trying to put a veneer of simplicity on their products, but in my opinion, giving users more information is better than making them guess.

In fact, it’s not just new features that leave users guessing. Lots of the ways Mail has worked for the past decade have been far from obvious, with explanations in Mail’s built-in help or on Apple’s Web site being either inadequate or absent. Mail is an outstandingly powerful tool, but too many of its capabilities are left undocumented—either you stumble across them or you don’t.

Email is crucial to my work and personal life, and my feeling is that I can’t afford to have anything less than a complete grip on the tool I use to manage it. Since Apple didn’t provide the instructions I needed, I spent lots of time figuring out how things worked and wrote my own instruction manual! That’s the book you’re now reading. It explains all the important things I’ve wondered how to do in Mail. I hope you’ll find it both helpful and interesting.

Quick Start to Controlling Apple Mail

Manage Mail setup:

• Start on the right foot as you Learn What’s New in Mountain 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.

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.
• 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 Version 1.1

This minor update addresses a few issues in Mail that came to light in the weeks immediately after Mountain Lion’s release. I changed the following:

• Added a sidebar Run Unsupported Plug-ins, which is also referenced in the discussion of MailFollowUp in the sidebar Follow Up on a Message You Sent
• Updated the sidebar Where Attachments Live and How to Delete Them to correct the location of the Mail Downloads folder in Mountain Lion
• In Choose an Account or Address to Send From, added a link to a TidBITS article discussing differences in the way Mountain Lion Mail chooses a From account, as well as a Perturbed Replies sidebar
• Removed obsolete disclaimers about the availability of Mountain Lion-compatible versions of several plug-ins (QuoteFix, Mail Act-On, MsgFiler, and MailHub)
• Included a sidebar AppleScripts and Mail explaining where AppleScripts must now be located to run as actions in Mail rules

What Was New in Version 1.0

In this revised edition, I covered all the new features found in the Mountain Lion version of Mail (6.x). You can see a list of those features in Learn What’s New in Mountain Lion Mail. I also removed the discussion of features that no longer exist, and changed various terms to match Apple’s new usage in Mountain Lion—for example, Contacts is the new name for the app formerly known as Address Book, and Calendar is what we now call iCal. Other than Mountain Lion-related changes, however, I added no substantive new content since Take Control of Apple Mail in Lion.

What’s New in This Edition and in Apple Mail 6

The Mountain Lion version of Mail (6.x) hasn’t changed dramatically from the Lion version, but it does have several important differences:

• Easier account enabling/disabling: If you have multiple email accounts, you can now turn individual accounts on or off with fewer steps than previously required. See the sidebar Enable and Disable Accounts.
• VIPs: Mail can now identify and draw your attention to messages from the senders you consider most important. See Work with VIPs.
• Notifications: Besides optionally playing a sound when a message arrives, Mail can now take advantage of Mountain Lion’s system-wide Notification Center. See Manage Notifications.
• Shared pages from Safari: The new Share feature in Safari lets you send Web pages to Mail, where a pop-up menu lets you pick a format. See Attaching Web Pages from Safari.
• Archive mailbox: Building on the Archive command added in Lion, Mail in Mountain Lion treats a top-level Archive mailbox as a “special” mailbox, including unifying Archive mailboxes from multiple accounts. See Special Mailboxes.
• Inline find: When searching within the text of the current message, Mail now uses an inline interface much like that of Safari. See Search within the Current Message.
• No more notes: In Mountain Lion, the new stand-alone Notes app is responsible for displaying and syncing notes, so that capability has been removed from Mail. But don’t worry, your notes are still safe—they’re just in a different location.
• No more RSS: The Mountain Lion version of Mail no longer displays RSS feeds, so you’ll have to turn to any of numerous third-party RSS readers for this purpose.

Do you have any ebooks about older versions of Apple Mail?

Yes, we've been doing this for a while now. You can choose from Take Control of Email with Apple Mail (covers Mail in 10.3 Panther), Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard, Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard, and Take Control of Apple Mail in Lion.

Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?

There are lots of great ways to read our ebooks on these devices. For more details, please read our latest Device Advice.

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Update Plans

August 24, 2012 -- Now that we've tweaked the ebook with some information that came to light after Mountain Lion was released, we have no special plans to update it again.

—Tonya Engst 

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