MacMost: Email

You can use the Workflow app to create little programs to automate tasks on your iPhone or iPad. In this example, we'll create a workflow that will send a new email message with the subject, body and from address pre-filled. You can add this as an icon to your Home screen, or to the Today screen for easy access.

Forwarding email is a quick way to send along an email you received to someone else. But it also means that when that person responds, the response will come to you, not the original sender. You can use Mac Mail's Redirect command to send the message to someone else and retain the sender in the From field so that replies will skip you and go directly back to the original sender. This is useful when you need to send along a question to someone else to answer it.

A new Filter button in the email app allows you to quickly and easily filter your email in the mailbox you are viewing. You can change the filter criteria.

With Mac Mail you can view individual messages or group them together in conversations. Which you use is a personal preference. With conversations you can view all of the messages sent back and forth between two or more people about a single subject. This makes following responses easier.

When you get junk email, you should never trust the from field to be accurate. It is easy to fake the from field making the email appear to come from anyone, even people you know. Spammers will use this to fool people into opening their email. If someone gets spam that appears to come from you, most likely it is not because your computer or email account have been compromised, but simply that your email address is being spoofed.

When it is time to change your email address, there is a lot to consider. You'll need to notify people you correspond with, but also update a lot of online accounts that use that email address as an ID. The key is to continue to monitor your old email address for a while to make sure the transition is smooth.

In addition to sending email 'to' someone, you can also include additional email addresses in the CD and BCC fields. CC is a way to send copies of your messages to people that need to know the information, but don't need to respond. BCC is a good way to send messages to people without sharing their email address with others.

With OS X Yosemite you can mark up images and PDF files right inside of the Mail composition window. This can make it easy to send notes and revisions back and forth between people working on projects. You can also add signatures to PDFs easily in a reply. The same tools are available in the Preview app outside of Mail. In the future, Apple and third-parties can add more extensions like Markup.

While you can't create rules in the Mail app for iOS, you can set rules at the server level if you are using iCloud email. These rules will be applied before the email arrives on your iPhone or iPad. This is also useful if you are using multiple computers and want the rules to apply to all of them and your devices.

Using the Mail app on your Mac you can get a special alert when an email from a specific sender arrives. This can be a sound, notification, icon bounce or even a special color for the email in your inbox. To do this, learn to use Mail rules. A rule can identify a new message and then apply an action to it. You can also have messages forwarded to another email address.

Mountain Lion offers four different ways to send web pages from Safari through Mail. You can send a plain link, as before, or send the page as HTML, a PDF or Reader content only. The trick is knowing where to select which of the four options you want.

When users first switch to Gmail from an older email service, it is hard to understand the concept of labels and an All Mail folder. With Gmail, you wouldn't typically delete email, but simply add or remove labels. These labels look like folders when you use Apple's Mail program, but understanding how they really work will help you use your Gmail account.

When you send a message you have several options to be able to send it to more than one person. Find out how and why to use the CC and BCC fields in Mail. Also learn about the priority setting and other options.

Here's a look at some of the common email etiquette mistakes that people make, like typing in capital letters, including unnecessarily large attachments, quoting all of the previous message and forwarding unwanted emails. Many of the same mistakes are made in forums and message boards.

When you sign up with an ISP like a cable modem, DSL or mobile provider you are often given a free email address using the domain name of the ISP. Many people use these as their primary email address. Here are five reasons why that is a bad idea and you should instead use a portable free email service like iCloud or Gmail, or get your own domain name.

Lion Mail's new interface is different from previous versions of Mail. Learn how to use the three-column view. See how you can use the Favorites bar to make the mailbox column unnecessary. Learn about the Archive function and how to use keyboard shortcuts to move messages into mailboxes.