11/26/20
9:00 am
20 Mac Mail Tips And Tricks

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of the the Mac Mail app. Learn how to customize the sidebar, redirect messages, markup images and PDFs and much more.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips for using Mac Mail.
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The Mac Mail app has a lot of hidden functionality that not even power users know about. Let's start with the simple one. If you want to create an email message that's primarily an attachment, you want to send a file to somebody, you don't have to start with Mail itself. You can simply drag something, like this image here, into the Dock to the Mail app. What this does is automatically open up a new composition window with that file attached and in the message and you're there ready to type who it's to. Now when you attach an image in a mail message you get to decide whether you send the original image or a more compressed version of it. In a lot of cases a compressed version is just fine. If you look over here you could see Image Size and you can choose from Actual Size, and then Small, Medium, or Large depending upon how big the image is. If it's a small image like this one you're not going to have medium or large options. Pay special attention to this. I often get a lot of screenshots that are automatically set to small and they compress the image so much I can't read anything on it. So make sure you're sending something that's appropriate. If you want somebody to get the full resolution image choose the actual size. Otherwise choose one that works best keeping in mind that they might not have as much bandwidth as you do. 
Now a lot of us suffer from information overload. You're trying to get your work done and you're constantly getting interrupted with new email messages coming in. Well, you can put a stop to that by going to Mail, Preferences, and then going to General. There you can set Check For New Messages from Automatically to Manually. When you set it to manually you then have to click this button for it to fetch email. So now you can wait until you're ready to deal with email before you see what's new. 
When you're looking at an email message like this and you want to respond you hit the Respond button and you'll usually find that the message is quoted right there. But you can quote only part of the message by selecting that part and then hitting Reply. Notice only the selected part is part of the response. This is especially useful if somebody sends you a lot of information and you just want to answer one specific question in there. Now you can find settings for this in Preferences under Composing. You've got When Quoting Text in Replies or Forwards include all of the original text or just the selected text, if any. Also in Signatures you can control whether the signature is above or below the quoted text. So notice here it's above. So the quoted text is down below which can make it hard for the person to see what question you're responding to. Instead if you uncheck that and then you respond you can see how it places their quoted text above your signature. Now you can simply click down in here and answer their question and it kind of reads more naturally. 
Whether you're sending a new email or replying to an existing email you can blind copy somebody on that. So normally if I were to add another address in the To field it would go to both people. The same thing if I use CC here which just makes it clear who this is to and who is just getting a copy of it. But if you want to send a hidden copy so the person it's going to has no idea this is also going to another person you can go to View and then turn on bcc Address Field. Now you can enter another email address here. The person the email is going to has no idea it's sent there. 
Notice in the left sidebar you'll have things like iCloud or maybe Gmail or Yahoo right here identifying each different account that you've got. If you have multiple accounts from the same service, like say multiple Gmail accounts, it could be hard to figure out which one is which. All you need to do is go to Mail Preferences. Then go to Accounts. For each Account look in Account Information and there's a description field. You can change this to whatever you want. So you can call it something more appropriate and then you could see it would change here to reflect your description.  
Now while you're here take a look at Mailbox Behaviors. The first item here is Drafts Mailbox. Now a lot of people complain they have a problem where they have a Drafts folder that's filled with semi-completed email messages and then you'll see these on your other devices and things as well. What I find is handy to do is change your Drafts mailbox to On My Mac. So your drafts are saved locally not on the server. Another setting to look at is under viewing there's a checkbox here for Smart Addresses. So notice here the Smart Address is checked. I just see the person's name. If you like that fine. But if you turn that off it will change this behavior if I click away and then click this message again you could see now it shows me their name and their email address. 
When you go to compose a new message and you start typing you'll see some suggestions. Now some of these you may recognize from your Contacts. Some of those aren't in your Contacts. They are taken from emails you've previously received. If you want to edit that list go to Window and then Previous Recipients and then you see a list here. You can go through it. You can select one, or remove it from the list. You can also select one and add it to your Contacts. 
Now let's say you get an email to you but it really should be handled by somebody else.  You want to forward it to somebody. You can use the Forward button here and now it takes that message, it quotes it, allows you to enter in your own message at the top. If that's what you want fine. But if you want to just send this message exactly as it is to somebody else instead go to Message and then Redirect. This then takes the message as it is here and sends it to whoever you specify. 
Now let's say you're composing a new message and you've attached an image or a pdf document and you want to point something out in the document. You can annotate it right her by clicking on this button and choosing Markup. This brings up Markup Tools. You could do a variety of things like, for instance, add an arrow. Then when you send this that is what the recipient gets. It doesn't change your original image at all. It only changes the one that's sent.
This also works with pdf's. You could choose Markup here and then you could markup the pdf with something. We can QuickLook at this pdf here in the message but your original pdf hasn't changed. 
Next I want to show you a feature called Smart Mailboxes. You can create one by going to Mailbox and then New Smart Mailbox. Now I think this is a misnamed feature. Instead of Smart Mailbox this should be called Smart Search because the best way to use it is if you're performing a search pretty often. You can make it much simpler. Like for instance here you could see I can name this what I want and I could say Contains any message that's from this particular address. But I could also add other criteria. So, for instance, I could say if it's also from this address. So in other words the messages that come from these two. But there are tons of other criteria that you could use as well to build a very intelligent search and save it as a Smart Mailbox. As a matter of fact you'll get one here by default that just Today and it just shows you all of today's messages. 
So for instance you could create a Smart Mailbox from all the messages coming from a particular address or a particular domain or maybe containing a particular subject and then instead of having to manually organize those into a special mailbox or to perform a search over and over again every time you want to see those you could just go to your Smart Mailbox. 
Now the Notifications you get when you get a new email could be customized. You go to Mail Preferences and then to General. You could see new Message notifications and you could change it to Inbox Only or Only When you get new email from VIP's, or somebody in your Contacts or you could even use a Smart Mailbox. So you could setup a Smart Mailbox that is specifically to indicate who you're supposed to get Notifications from when you get a new email. Then just use it here. You don't have to even look at that Smart Mailbox. You're just using it as a Notifications filter. In addition to that you should note that you could go to System Preferences and then to Notifications and then from there you could go to Mail and here's where you setup what notifications look like. You could use Banners that will go away automatically or Alerts that stay there. You could determine whether or not they are in Notification Center or whether they are seen on your Lock screen. Whether there's a badge on the app icon, a number that tells you how many new emails you have. 
Now if you're ever having trouble with email, if you have a mailbox or an account that just doesn't seem to be updating, the first thing you should do is select that mailbox and then go to Mailbox Rebuild. This will rebuild what you see in your Mail app from the information on the server. Also notice here on the sidebar you have Favorites here at the top. So I have Inbox and Sent. But you could see Inbox and Sent are also here under my account. I can put something else. For instance if I wanted to have Archive in Favorites as well I can move that up there. I can then Hide this because everything I really need is up here. You can Control click on these and remove them from your Favorites as well or just drag them out.
Now if an email is really important and you want to save a copy of it somewhere outside of Mail all you need to do is drag and drop. You could just drag and drop this to any Finder window. You can see it creates an EML file. I can even select that and hit the spacebar to look at it in QuickLook. If I double click on it it will open it up in the Mail app in a separate window. 
Now let's say you send an email to somebody but it bounced because their email address was wrong. You don't have to go and recreate the message from scratch. You can select the message from your Sent Mailbox and then go to Message Send Again. That brings up composition window with the exact message you sent before. Then you could just delete the To address there and type a new one and then send it. 
So here's one last tip. If you want a different way to view your list of emails rather than this method here which shows you everything about that message in a tiny little block you can instead go to the Column View. Go to View, Use Column Layout. Now Column Layout is different in Big Sur than it was in previous versions. It looks more like normal columns that you would see in other apps. You can click and click again to sort the columns. You could adjust the column widths. You can Control click and select other columns to view as well. You could select it to have the message previewed here on the bottom or you could go to View and Show Side Preview and get the preview here on the right side. Drag that line to change how much space is available for the list versus the preview.
So I hope you like this look at some Mac Mail tips. Hopefully you're able to use some of these to increase your productivity.
Comments: 44 Responses to “20 Mac Mail Tips And Tricks”

Stan May
4 years ago
Thanks Gary these tips are really useful. There is one additional thing I was hoping would be addressed. In Big Sur, I can no longer swipe left to delete nor right to mark unread. Did we just lose this functionality or can we turn it on somehow?
Thanks...stan
Comments: 44 Responses to “20 Mac Mail Tips And Tricks”

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