11/1/22
9:00 am

9 New Features in the Mac Mail App

macOS Ventura adds some useful, and some not-so-useful features to the Mail app. Learn how to Undo Send, schedule a message for later and more.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at all the new Mail features in macOS Ventura. 
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There are a lot of new features in the Mac Mail App in macOS Ventura. Let's take a look at each one. First there's the Undo function. So now when you go to send an email if you look at the bottom left you'll see an Undo Send button. That will be there for a short period of time. Click that and then the Mail composition window comes back and the mail isn't sent. Now the way this works is very simple. The mail actually isn't sent when you hit the Send button. Instead there is a delay. If you hit the Undo button before the delay the send never happens. This is similar to how other email apps do an Undo Send. Because the way email works is once the email is actually sent it goes off of your service, whether that is iCloud, gmail, or whatever, it goes out to the internet and to somebody else's service. So there is no way to call it back. Now you can change the delay amount by going to Mail, Settings. Then under Composing you could look for the Undo Sent Delay. You can set it to 10 seconds, 20, seconds, 30 seconds or turn it Off if you'd rather have email sent right away and remove the Undo function completely.
Now we also have the ability to Send at a later time. So instead of just clicking the Send button here you can click this little menu next to it. You get the option to Send Now, or Send 9 p.m. tonight, or Send Later. If you choose Send Later you can pick any date and any time that you want and schedule the email to Send. When you do this the Mail App is what is going to be what sends the email. It doesn't go out to the server or anything. So, of course, you Mac needs to be on else it can't actually perform this action. But it is okay if the Mail App isn't running or if you Mac is asleep. It will still send. Of course your Mac must be online in order to send email in the first place. So if your Mac happens to be offline when the time comes it is not going to be able to send the email until you are back online. If you schedule it to Send Later, like this, then you'll see it appear here on the left under Send Later. You can select that little temporary mailbox that appears there. Go to the message and you'll see This email will be Sent and Edit that and change the time. If you change your mind you can simply Delete the message completely. 
Now those features are very useful and very straight forward. But the next two features not so much. First we've got the Remind Me feature. So let's say you get an email like this in your inbox and you can't deal with it right now. You'd rather get a reminder at some point later on. You can go to Message Remind Me and and you can have a reminder sent in an hour, tonight, tomorrow, or remind me later and then set a time to get a reminder. But you don't actually really get a reminder for this. This isn't related to the Reminder's App. What will happen is, you see this little clock up here in the List, you'll see a little Remind Me List that appears here as long as you have at least one message with this set. The message itself will have this at the top telling you what time you're going to get reminded. You can go to Edit and you can Remove the Reminder, if you want,. But all that happens at the time of the reminder is the message will move back to the top of your Inbox. So, in my case here I just have one message in the Inbox. It's not going to make any difference. But if I say had 30 messages in my Inbox and this was at the bottom then after the Remind Me time this would move to the top. I still have to be looking at my Inbox to even notice this change. So this is not really useful for those of us who keep a clean Inbox. But if you do have a messy Inbox with lots of stuff in there you could use this to have something go to the top after a period of time. 
Not what makes this even less useful is the fact that this has to remain in the Inbox for this to work. So if I were to Archive this message it's no longer there in Remind Me and it no longer has that indicator. If I were to bring it back into my Inbox it gets back the Remind Me indicator here although it doesn't appear in any special list anymore. This would be so much more useful if these messages actually disappeared from the Inbox and only were in Remind Me. Then it could be a way for you to clear out your Inbox and have messages go back into it after a period of time. Or at least let you Archive these messages and have them go back into your Inbox when the time arrives. 
Note: You can Edit the Reminder there and remove the Reminder completely like that to return it to normal. 
Now the Followup feature is even less useful. The Followup feature only works on messages that you've sent. The idea is you send the message like this where maybe you're asking a question. If you haven't gotten a response then this message, the message you've sent, may appear in your Inbox even though it is not an incoming message. It's one you've sent after a period of time. But here's the thing. You can't send a message to have a followup. It has to happen automatically. So, the Mail App is looking at the language in your message figuring out which message's should have a followup and also determining when that followup should appear. This is doing it automatically. There is no way to manually say, yes I definitely need a followup for this message and no I don't need a followup for this one. As of yet I haven't seen a single message showing up as a followup for me. 
If you do start to see messages that are set to followup and you're not finding this useful you can go to Mail Settings General and there's a way to switch this off. 
Now whether we like to admit it or not from time to time we make a mistake in sending an email. Like, for instance, forgetting to include an attachment. What's worse is when we actually mention in the message that there is an attachment but we forget to include it. Well, Mail is now smart enough to actually see that we've mentioned an attachment and when we go to Send it is going to give us a Warning. Probably at some point you've done this and having this little warning will be really nice. Supposedly this feature also works with recipients. If it determines from what you have written that somebody else should be included in the message then it will prompt you for that as well. 
Note: These features only work right now if your language is set to English. 
Now another improvement to Mail is Search. So there are two things that are improved here. One is easy to see. The other is not so easy. If you start a Search for something it is supposed to give you richer suggestions here on the right. Now it definitely does look different here in Ventura than it does in Monterey. But I'm having a hard time seeing how it is any better. It gives you the ability to narrow by subject or by attachment and it gives you some suggestions of things you could be looking for. But we had that in Monterey as well. So it is a little unclear about how the Search suggestions are any better. 
But the one thing it definitely does do is help with misspellings. For instance if I misspell Plans you could see how it still finds email messages that have that word in it. It even also flags some that have word Plus. This feature also only works if your language is set to English, at least for now.
Another new feature is Rich Links. So here I've got a message I'm composing. Let's say I want to include a URL, like for this page here. So I'm going to copy this URL and I'm going to paste it in. Notice how it changes to be a Rich Link. It's taken the key photo from that page and displaying it here and a nice little title and what website it's from. This is how it has worked for a little while in Messages. This is really nice but if you'd rather it just stay  Plain Links you could click here and convert to Plain Link.
Now another new feature is a really interesting Security feature that is going to take some time for it to become useful. It's about using this BIMI support. This will allow companies to basically certify their email as being official email. Then using a special logo they provide that will then appear in Mail.  A variety of other 3rd party mail systems have already adopted this. I haven't seen it in action yet. But I believe the idea is that you would see the official logo appear here. Now normally you would see initials here by default. But you would also see the image of anybody that is in your contacts. But if a company sends you a message and is using this system and has their email certified as being authentic then you should see their logo appear here. You'll probably also see it if you turn On the Show Contact Photo for the list. Probably also see it here. So the idea would be that say if you got an email from your bank you would see the bank logo there even though you haven't added the bank logo to your contact. As you grow used to seeing that over time as the logo appearing next to your bank emails, when you get a fake malicious email pretending to be from your bank you wouldn't see that. It wouldn't have that certification so you would see the regular initials there and hopefully this will alert you to the fact that it is not really coming from the source you think. So while it is hard to find now I expect to see this more and more over the next year as companies start to use this system. 
So that's a look at all the new Mail features. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 23 Responses to “9 New Features in the Mac Mail App”

Jonathan

1 year ago

The new Mail Smart Search feature is nice when it comes to attachments. But it can be kind of a nuisance sometimes. For example, when I want to forward a message that has others copied on it the system now asks me if I have forgotten to add recipients. It's not a big deal but it makes forwarding certain messages less streamlined. Is there anyway to adjust the smart search features in the new mail to make it less cumbersome or perhaps do you think it will learn my styles via AI?

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Jonathan: Those are two different features: Smart search and "Missing recipients and attachments." Unrelated. There's no setting to turn off Missing recipients and attachments right now. Perhaps send feedback to Apple letting them know you'd like it.

Scott

1 year ago

I was so looking forward to this Remind Me feature, and was shocked at how poorly and useless its implementation is. I'd love to ask the UI designers what they were thinking? I hope they get so much feedback that they make it a really useful feature, like:
- Any sent email can have an Remind Me attached to act as a follow up to unfinished business.
- Any Inbox email can have a Remind Me attached which would remove it from the Inbox until set date.

Both should have desktop notifications.

Robert Ethier

1 year ago

I’m not getting a warning that the afore-mentioned attachment has not been attached???
Tries testing it a few times.
I am completely up to date with Mac OS Ventura!
Robert

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Robert: That's a new feature, yes. It sees something in your text that makes it think you want to include an attachment, but haven't included it. If it guessed wrong, just click the right button to dismiss the warning.

Robert Ethier

1 year ago

Gary, what I’m saying is...”Im not getting the warning”! It just sends the email.
Robert

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Robert: Oh, well then it is the opposite. It isn't recognizing, based on the words you are using in your message, that an attachment is needed. It just looks at the words and tries to figure that out. It isn't going to be perfect.

Jonathan

1 year ago

How do I maintain fixed column widths (eg Subject,From, etc) in the view pane of of Column Layout in mail? When I set the widths to what I want they never seem to lock in, when I return to mail they always seem to spring back to what they were before I adjusted them.

Jonathan

1 year ago

I spent hours trying to figure this out but after sending the above question I almost immediately figured it out accidentally. When open messages in spilt view is enabled in mail settings the column widths seem to spring back, to where Mail wants them to be, after leaving spilt view. I tried disabling the option and when I return to the main screen after sending a message they seem to retain my custom widths.

Jan

1 year ago

In the Mail app under View, the Show Contact Photo is greyed out. Suggestions on how to fix that?! Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Jan: Try restarting Mail, maybe?

Jan

1 year ago

I closed Mail and also restarted my MacBook Air ... still doesn't work.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Jan: Are you using Column Layout?

Jan

1 year ago

Yes

Barbara Parisien

1 year ago

Do you think it's better to use the Mac mail app or, in my case Outlook?

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Barbara: "Better" is subjective. Which do YOU like better? Is there a reason you chose Outlook over Mail?

Barbara Parisien

1 year ago

I was having problems with my Msn mail which is Outlook so I started to use the Outlook app, but I would much prefer using the Mail app. Just worried that I'll have the same problems again with "Account error."

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Barbara; Don't know what problems you had before, but many people use the Mac Mail app to access Outlook. Why not just try it?

Claudio Silvaggi

1 year ago

thanks bother, I was hoping for a pinned email for important ones I don't want to forget about.. I leave them as unread but somehow they just get marked back to "read"... I'm going to try the reminder setting as this seems like it would work... Mary Christ Ma!..

Sam

1 year ago

Very irritated
Trying all ways to place a jpeg Signature in apple mail on my IPAD pro and failed totally
Is there a way ?

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Sam: Copy and paste doesn't work? I would strongly advise against doing this anyway. It would mean that every email you send will have an attachment. That would irritate some recipients (I know it does for me).

nick

1 year ago

Gary: keep forgetting to ask this question...usually when I save a Mail message I save it as a Raw Message Source, so that I can open it with Mail. Most time this works fine, but sometimes the saved file is a jumbled mess of text with no apparent format. Do you have any tips on which format to save messages? I see RTF and Plain Text are also options. I just wanna make sure the saved file is readable.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Nick: See https://macmost.com/better-ways-to-organize-important-email-messages-on-your-mac.html

Comments Closed.

9 New Features in the Mac Mail App

Comments: 23 Responses to “9 New Features in the Mac Mail App”

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