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Three-panel Apple Emails?

My Apple Mt Lion email suddenly toggled to a 2-column format, mailboxes and messages with 2 lines of text. No third column (as once in Letterbox) on the right with a preview. There’s not a simple command I can find that to retrieve previous formatting. Any help much appreciated.
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Stephen Yafa

Comments: 2 Responses to “Three-panel Apple Emails?”

    11 years ago

    So a lot of Mac apps have multiple parts to their windows. For instance, iMovie has and event section, a projects section, a preview section, lots of toolbars, etc. These are sometimes called "panes" -- as in window panes.
    Mac Mail has lots of panes too. You can have mailboxes on the left, messages in the middle and the message viewer on the right. But in your case you have lost the message viewer.
    In between panes there is usually a line. If you hover your cursor over the line, you can click and drag left and right to change the amount of space allocated to each pane. So, for instance, you can click and drag the line between the list of messages the the message viewer and give more space to one or the other.
    And, if you pull that line all the way to the right, you will give all of the space to the message list, and none to the message viewer. I think that is what has happened in your case. It is easier to do than you think because you can also double-click on that line and it will move all the way to the right.
    Now if you look all the way to the right side of your Mail window, you will see that the line on the right is a little thicker than normal. There is also a dot in the very middle of the line. That dot is your clue in cases like this that the line is hiding a pane in the window. So click and drag that thick line over to the left. That will bring back your message viewer.

    Stephen Yafa
    11 years ago

    You solved this problem in seconds.
    Many thanks!
    Steve

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