Chapter 7. Email

IN THIS CHAPTER:

54 Configure a New Mail Account

55 Find and Read Messages and Attachments

56 Send a Message

57 Filter Junk Mail

58 Create a Mailbox

59 Create a Smart Mailbox for Certain Types of Messages

60 Import Mailboxes from Another Email Application

Arguably the most revolutionary and pervasive part of the Internet (rivaled only by browsing the Web), email is an application whose use has joined the world's lexicon as firmly as television didand much more quickly. It's easy to understand why: Now, effectively for free, a person anywhere on Earth can communicate nearly instantaneously with someone else no matter where she is on the planet. Email has become the lingua franca of the Information Age; people use it to send each other everything from brief one-line messages to whole picture albums or business documents. Email can get you in touch with everybody from a family member down the hall to your congressman or favorite author. For all that, email is still conceptually one of the simplest of applications: You type in some text, and off it goes into the cloud of flowing bits that is the Internet.

Anybody who has ever used email before, though, will know that there's actually a lot more to it than that. Everybody has their own style for how they use email, from what "signatures" they attach to the ends of messages to how they prefer incoming messages to be listed. Email applications in recent years have become increasingly complex, adding more and more convenience and flexibility so that the user has complete control over the entire experience of interacting with their virtual mailboxes. Applications such as Microsoft Outlook, in particular, have set a new standard for just how complex a concept as simple as email can be made.

Apple's Mail application, built in to Mac OS X, provides all the flexibility of programs such as Outlook, coupled with the intuitiveness and elegance typical of Apple software. While .Mac Webmail (covered in 48 Use .Mac Webmail ) offers you convenient but rudimentary access to your .Mac mail account, it can be vastly more intuitive, fast, and flexible to use Mail to read the email in that account (and any other email accounts you might have) on your own computer rather than on the Web. All the advanced features of modern email programs are incorporated into Mailautomatic junk-mail filtering, color -based message flagging, automated message organization with user-definable rules, LDAP directory integration, and support for POP and IMAP mail access protocols. Starting in Mac OS X Tiger, Mail incorporates the searching technology of Spotlight (see 12 Find an Item ) to allow you to search and organize your incoming email messages like a master conductor directing a symphony orchestra. Mail's Preferences window contains innumerable ways to configure the application to match your work style; this chapter will concentrate on the most important core features of Mail, while pointing out areas where you can customize it to your taste.

Working in tandem with your Address Book (a small application that keeps track of all your "contacts," the people you correspond with via email, phone, instant-message chat, or any other means) and synchronizing all your information using iSync and .Mac, Mail is able to turn a formerly austere and potentially confusing form of communication into one that anticipates what you want to say and who you want to say it to. Refer to 95 Add a Person to Your Address Book to start making the most of your Address Book, and 100 Synchronize Your Information Using .Mac for more about synchronizing your contacts across all your Macs.

KEY TERMS

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) The standard "directory service" mechanism, allowing email applications to obtain names , phone numbers , and email addresses automatically with a query to a corporate server.