7 Tips For Replying To Email On Your Mac

When replying to an email message, don't just quote the entire message and write a response at the top or the bottom. Instead quote the previous message thoughtfully, pay attention to details, and create a better result.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips that you can use for replying to email on your Mac. 
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So if you want to reply to an email in Mail usually you just quickly click reply, type your response, and send it. But this doesn't always give you the best results. There are a lot of things you should pay attention to when replying to email and a lot of ways to make your reply better. 
So, for instance, here I've got a message from someone and I want to reply to them. I could click the Reply button here and now I could type my reply at the top, hit Send, and be done with it. But let's first focus on exactly what happened here in terms of this. This is the message that they sent. The entire thing here is quoted and I'm responding here at the top. There are a few ways that I could do better including less of this and making it more obvious as to what it is I'm responding to here at the top. Go to Mail, Preferences. Then go to Composing. Then if you look here you'll see Quote the Text of the Original Message. If you have that turned off then things simply won't be quoted. You respond and it's a brand new message. Which can make it really difficult for the other person to know what it is you're responding to. Maybe they send a lot of messages. Maybe they send you a lot of messages and they have to get from what you write exactly what it is you're saying. Sometimes quoting what they say and then answering that is the best way to do it. Having this turned On is best. But you don't necessarily need to quote the entire thing. If you look down here you have two choices. Include All of the Original Message Text or Include Only the Selected Text. Note that if you choose to include only the selected text, if nothing is selected then all text is included. So you have the best of both worlds. 
Now if I want to respond to this message by answering one of the questions in here I could simply select the question, like that. Then I could click the Reply button and notice only that part is quoted. So if I put something like this and I send it you could see how I was able to type very little and yet it's very obvious to the other person what it is I'm saying. Here's what they asked. Here's how I responded. I could also, of course, instead of responding up here simply place my cursor there and then put the response there. This is particularly useful when there are multiple questions in the original email. I can select from the first question to second question. Then I could hit Reply. Then I could simply place my cursor here. Press Return and I can answer this question and then I could go and edit others here, deleting sections like that, making it nice and neat, and then answering another question right here. You could see how the results are going to be much better. Not only am I going to be able to type less because I'm simply responding to questions here, but it's going to be easier for them to read the email and see my answers. Compare that to simply responding and putting everything at the top here. I may have to provide more details here to explain what it is I'm saying based on the questions that they asked. 
I'm actually surprised more people don't do this. I've always done this. I've always quoted just the parts of the original message that I wanted and I've deleted other little sections and answered questions right underneath the question that they've asked and made the reply minimal and easy for them to deal with. But I often get email from people that respond to everything at the top or bottom or put their answers in the middle but use Text formatting to make it stand out. Look how nice this response looks and look at how easy it's going to be for the recipient to be able to see the answers to the questions. 
Now another option here in Preferences isn't under Composing but under Signatures. At the bottom here you can see, Place Signature Above Quoted Text. So if I select it here then I respond to this message. You could see how I could type there and my signature is right underneath it. The other option is to have that turned Off and then when I respond my signature is all the way at the bottom which may mean they never see it. Now you should put it where you are responding. So if you find that you're often responding here at the top then you don't have the signature there at the bottom. It may actually take them a few seconds to figure out who it is responding. They may have to look up here at the Headers rather than having the signature right underneath what you're writing. So decide based on the style of how you respond where that signature will go. But don't be afraid to move it. You can always just grab it, Copy and Paste.
Now another thing to keep in mind when replying is that when you reply you're only replying to the sender. So notice here this is From this email address but there's also a cc right there. So it actually is a conversation between three people. Me, the original sender, and someone else. If I just reply then I'm only replying to the original sender. So when you see that make sure you use the Reply All button right here. Now notice that it goes back to the original sender but the person who got cc'd on the previous message is going to get cc'd on this one now and will be kept in the loop. So always take a second to check this and make sure you're using Reply or Reply All properly. 
If you make a mistake and you already responded to this but you haven't sent it yet there's a handy little button here that will fix the mistake. You could see how it adds the cc right there. If you want to add something else to the conversation you could do that as well. A handy way to do it is just right here in the To field. Just include them there. That's probably you're best bet. But you could also go to View and then CC Address Field and it will add this here. You can add somebody in. Typically when I use cc it's been to send the email also to somebody but kind of signal to them they don't need to participate in the conversation. I just want them to have a copy of this. 
Now you could also go to bcc address field and add that as well. The person that the message is sent to and anybody it is cc'd to won't know that this was also bcc'd to that other person. Which could be useful if you want to keep that secret. But it's also useful if you simply want to notify that other person but you don't want them to get all wrapped up in the back and forth conversation. For instance if you're arranging a business meeting and you've set a time and you want your spouse to know that you're going to be at a business meeting at that time then if you use bcc they'll get a copy of the email but they won't have to worry about participating in the rest of the responses.
Now when you're using Mail in full screen mode replying works a little differently. So I'll go into Full Screen Mode here and let's say I want to reply. Well, there should be another window that pops up with Reply in it. But in full screen mode there shouldn't be any other windows. So what happens exactly? Well, it's one of two things. If I reply to this message you could see what happens here is I go into Split View. So I actually have the Mail app 's main window here on the left and my reply here on the right. But there's another way to do it. If I go into Mail, Preferences and then I go into General you could see here a checkbox for Prefer Spending Message is in Split View when it's Full Screen. Let me turn that Off. Now let me reply. Now what happens is instead I get this window that appears over the Full Screen App. Notice the Full Screen App window here is grayed out now. I just have my Reply. So I can finish the reply here and send it and I will get back to the regular mode. 
But I could also click outside here and notice what happens. The window is still there. It just goes all the way to the bottom. I could click there to bring it back up. So if I need to refer to the original message or check something else I can and I've got this halfway composed reply there at the bottom. You also see it here under Window. You could see it listed and that will also bring it back up. If I'm replying to multiple messages I'll just reply to this message a second time here. Then I could see this window now has two tabs in it. 
Note that if you're already using Mail in Split View, so you've got say Mail on the left and something like Messages on the right then it's going to automatically use this overlay window style because there's no other place to put that reply window. 
Now when replying to a message one of the things you want to pay attention to is both your From email address and your Signature because you can change these. In this case I just have one signature here. But I think it's important to tailor the signature to the recipient and the situation. For instance, you may have a professional signature that has all sorts of details about how to contact you, your website, maybe even an image. But if you're responding to a friend or somebody who already knows all of that information then changing your signature to a simpler one when responding may be a bit better. On the other hand if somebody is asking a professional question and you kind of want to move the level of professionalism up you may have a different signature you can choose that has all that information. So don't sleep on choosing a signature or, in fact, changing which email address you're using if you have multiple accounts. Somebody emails you at one account but you want to switch the conversation over to using another account you can certainly do that here right in the Reply. 
Now notice how this message has an attachment in it. If I Reply to it the attachment isn't there. I get a little indicator that it was there but it's not there. However, I could click this button here which will include the attachments from the original message. Now you could see it's putting it there. So I can respond with this attachment. I can click there and choose Markup. Now I can markup this attachment. For instance, in this message I can simply use the Markup tools to circle an area like that. Done. Then my response could be something like this. Of course then you can get a response with an image that's marked up by the other person. You can go back and forth like that. You could do the same thing with attached pdf's by the way. 
So there's some tips for replying to email on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “7 Tips For Replying To Email On Your Mac”

Penelope Gruen

10 months ago

Gary,
Mail Tips greatly appreciated. I am always looking for greater efficiency in using my Apple devices, and you deliver!

nick

hey Gary, under Preferences > Composing would you suggest using "Use the same message format as the original message" option, or not? Not sure what the advantage would be of one over the other. Thx

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: So if the original message was in plain text, you'd reply in plain text. If rich text, then rich text. Otherwise, with this off, it would use whatever you have as default. Up to you if you want to set that or not.

Sherry

Gary,
If I needed to reply to a client whose message is in the sent folder, is there a way to find it quickly without having to scroll through the other 40 that's in there as well?

Sherry: Search for it. But if you don't know the name or any info to search for, I'm not sure what you can do other than browse.

Dinorah

Hi Gary, I created a signature. To test it I composed a message to myself. The signature shows in Preferences > Signatures pane but not in composed or received mail. Not sure if I skipped something? Thanks

Dinorah: Check out
https://macmost.com/setting-up-your-mac-mail-signatures.html

7 Tips For Replying To Email On Your Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “7 Tips For Replying To Email On Your Mac”

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