Mac Mail App Preferences You May Want To Customize

There are many important settings in Mail Preferences that you can use to customize your experience and improve productivity. Take this tour of the Mail Preferences and see which ones you should change.

Check out Mac Mail App Preferences You May Want To Customize at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at customizing the Mail app in Mail Preferences.
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So for most apps you only need to go to Preferences if you want to change something from how it works by default. However in the Mail app I think it's worthwhile to go through the Mail, Preferences and see all the options there. They all work a little differently especially when it comes to email and I think it's worthwhile to see what settings can be changed to make receiving and sending email more efficient for you.
So let's go to Mail, Preferences and take a look at those. Under General, we'll start off with the first one, default email reader. This is one you may want to set especially if you're not using Mail because this is the default app that will come up if you click a link in a webpage or in an app that opens up a new email message. So if you're not using Mail you'll want to set it to something else. Strangely enough you have to go into Mail to make that change.
After that you've got how often new messages are checked for. It's usually set to automatically which will actually check more often when you're plugged into power than when you're using battery. You can set it to a specific time. A cool productivity hack is to set it to Manually and then you have to manually hit the Get Mail button in the Toolbar to check for new email. This is great when you don't want to be interrupted by new email messages coming in.
Then you've got Sound. You can change the sound for a new message coming in or set it to none. You also can check or uncheck this box depending upon whether you want other sounds to play. A lot of people ask me how to stop that whoosh sound from playing every time they send an email. It's kind of unnecessary. This checkbox will do it for you.
Next you have the number that appears in the Dock. So with the little icon here sometime you'll have a red number like 1, 2, 3. That will tell you how many new unread emails are in your inbox. But you could change that to all mailboxes or use a Smart mailbox instead. You can also set New Message Notification. How often you see those to anything new coming into your inbox or restrict it to only VIP contacts, Anybody in your contacts, or expend it to Anything New in All Mailboxes.
You can also set the Downloads folder for when you download an application. This is the default location for the that. You can always save each one individually, drag and drop, and all of that. But it's useful to have this set to the same location that Safari uses for downloads. But you can set it somewhere else if you want.
Next let's go to Accounts. Now what you see in Accounts is going to depend upon what email service you're using. So whether you're using iCloud, gmail, your ISP, your corporate email, or something else you're going to see different things here. So just looking at iCloud there are a few useful things you can setup. One is Drafts mailbox. I know especially for Goggle users they see tons of drafts getting saved into Goggle Draft Mailbox. You could change that to On My Mac and use the On My Mac drafts. So these drafts are never saved to the server and the email actually isn't even on the server until you actually hit Send.
You can do the same for Trash on the other end. So if you stick with your cloud Trash mailbox, which most people should probably do, but if you really want to have Trash on your Local drive you can set it for On My Mac. That way when you delete something it's pulled off the server and just saved locally. Now this is a very useful setting for a lot of people. I know a lot of people that will delete a message. It goes in the trash and they immediately go to Trash and then empty the trash. There's no need to do that. You can set it to automatically empty the trash every day or every time you quit Mail. Then you could just let things build up in the trash knowing that they won't stay there very long anyway.
Now under Fonts and Colors if you're composing plain text email messages like I do a lot then the message font setting here changes the font that you use when composing. Which is really handy if you want nice large text for composing emails. So, for instance, let's create an email message here. I have it set to Plain Text so when I type a message you could see it's pretty small. It's this Helvetica 12 pt. But I could change that here to say 18 pt and you could see it change its size.  Also Plain Text messages and messages just set with default font are going to appear larger over here while I'm reading as well. Message List Font will change the Preview section here. So I could go and enlarge this to make that larger.
Now under Viewing you could change the number of lines in a preview. You could see it expand here as I go from two to three lines. I can also change what happens when I hit the delete key with the message selected. It can either go to Archive which is what I want. But you could have it go to Trash. Notice if I swipe too I see Archive appear there. If I change this to Trash swiping will give me Delete.
Then you've got some settings here for Conversations. This is when you reply to somebody and they reply back to you. It's a back and forth conversation. Mail tries to recognize these and you have some settings for how they are shown and what happens when you're viewing them. You'll also, of course, under View can check Organize by Conversation or Highlight Conversation if you want better grouping of those.
Now under Composing you've got Default Messages Format, Plain text or Rich text. Either way you can switch when you're making a new message. So I can make a new message here and then go to Format. You could see I could switch to Rich Text. So I like to set my default as plain text because most of the time I just want to write some plain text and send it somebody and there's no reason to have rich text involved and send them a larger message. If you want you can have every message you send automatically copy yourself on it or blind copy yourself on it. So you get a copy sent back to you but the receiver doesn't know that it was blind copied.
There's a checkbox here that also applies to plain and rich text. That is to simply match the message. So if somebody sends you a rich text email and you reply, you'll be replying in rich text. If they send a plain text you'll be replying in plain text. Then you'll have some options that deal with quoting. So you can quote the text of the original message or not turn that off. Increase the quote level. How much is indented in the reply. Also how much to quote. I like having it set to Selected Text. So for instance if I were to reply to this message I hit you could see it's all included here. But if I were to select some text and then hit Reply only the selections included as quoted text. This gives you the opportunity to pick out something somebody asked and respond to that rather than including everything in the reply.
What about the rest? Well I don't recommend using the Junk Mail filtering. This is just local junk mail filtering on your Mac. It's not going to help you if you get your email anywhere else but your Mac say on you iPhone or whatever. It's best to leave junk mail filtering up to the Server. However the Blocked section here you can use to block email addresses and also phone numbers listed here for the Messages app. You can decide what happens to that when it matches. Signatures, of course, is a whole other thing and I've talked about that many times before setting up signatures and applying them to the different accounts so you have access to them. Also setting what the default signature is for each account.
Then there are mail rules which are useful but they are also only local to your Mac. So it's much better to go to iCloud.com. Go to the Mail app there and use the rules at iCloud.com. So basically I don't use the junk email filtering or the rules inside the Mail app. I let the server handle junk email filtering like I've talked about previously. If I'm going to do a rule I do it at iCloud.com or for my Goggle account I log on to gmail on the web and use the filtering tools there. But not everybody is like me. So you may want to use some local rules if that makes sense for you.

Comments: 16 Responses to “Mac Mail App Preferences You May Want To Customize”

Ken Vignona

7 months ago

Gary, Always interesting tutorials. I checked my preferences as video went on. You mention local rules. I went to that preference. What type of local rules are there? I use gmail for mostly everything and have set up my inbox/junk mail that works great for me, but is there something “better” in local rules. Thanks again,
Ken

Gary Rosenzweig

Ken: Server rules (“Filters” in Gmail) are better than local ones. Keep using them.

Peter Knight

Hi Gary,

Many thanks for the tutorial.

Is there any setting that can be changed in the mail app to set the viewing pane to display the email body/content below the message rather than to the right of the message?
I’m sure this was possible at one stage, but it seems to have been removed recently.

Many thanks,
Peter

Peter: Go to the View menu, uncheck Show Side Preview.

Jim Rietz

HI Gary,

At 03:29, you mention “Empty the Trash”. I have been working with a friend who mentions this and I have never seen Empt Trash outside of the Finder. You are normally very specific of exactly what is being talked about. I have not be able to find “Empty the Trash” in Apple Mail.

Thanks for all the great videos!

Jim

Jim: It is actually called “Erase Deleted Items” and you’ll find it in the Mailbox menu.

Eric

Jim: look at the menu Mailbox > Deleted Items > …

Well, there you go! Thank you Gary!

Joe Kozuh

Gary, there is 1 big issues involving MAIL: The software locks up often and the only solution is to RESTART your computer … !!!

Peter Eckle

How do you access these same setttings on an IPad?

Joe: That’s not normal. When Apple Stores reopen, I would have an expert (Genius Bar) take a look.

Peter: Mail settings are mostly in the Settings app on the iPad, though the app is very different there and these tips are for Mac Mail so many things will not apply.

Scott Hagarty

Gary:
Can you please explain in mail why attachments disappear? I went back to an old email where I received an attached document. The conversation went back and forth for many days. Now when I go back, the attachments are gone.
Also, would you please consider doing a video explaining the “conversations” setting.
Thank you

Scott: Attachments shouldn’t disappear. But perhaps your email server is doing it? Hard for me to say. Conversations just group a series of emails — people replying in a string of messages — so you can see them all together. Try it to see if you like it. Easy to turn on and off. It doesn’t change anything other than how you view messages.

Jerry Raphael

Annoying to me is mail window drops behind other windows say after watching one of your videos and closing video.
Another dislike is that after opening an email on the list then deleting it the next email automatically opens.
Hope this makes sense.

John Clark

As a way of compartmentalizing my life I use Apple Main on my Mac and iPad for personal stuff and I use MS Outlook for my full time job stuff. I have been really frustrated by the Outlook on the iPad having a Swipe to Archive. I am used to Swiping to delete on the Apple Mail. After seeing the above tutorial I was inspired and saw that I can customize the Swipe on Outlook. Now it goes to delete just like Apple Mail. Thank you for inspiring me to look.

Comments Closed.

Mac Mail App Preferences You May Want To Customize

Comments: 16 Responses to “Mac Mail App Preferences You May Want To Customize”

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