54. Configure a New Mail Account  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 30 Configure Networking Manually 45 Sign Up for .Mac
 SEE ALSO 55 Find and Read Messages and Attachments
If you have a .Mac account, using the @mac.com email address that comes with it is the easiest way to use the Mail application. .Mac email accounts use IMAP , the Internet Mail Access Protocol ; so do accounts hosted on a Microsoft Exchange server, as is often the case in corporate networks. You can set up many kinds of email accounts to use IMAP, from free hosting services to your own ISP's email service ( consult with the provider of your email service to see if it is capable of using IMAP). If you specify that your email account is a .Mac account, however, Mail uses certain default settings to allow you to interact with the .Mac mail servers without any further configuration. Mail can support many kinds of email accounts, but each account must be configured in the application before you can use it. When you configure the Mail program to use your email account, you'll have to enter a fair amount of information. Be sure that you have all the information you need from your Internet service provider (ISP) or network administrator: the type of email account, your email address, the incoming and outgoing mail servers, and your account name and password. IMAP operates by keeping all your messages and mailboxes on the mail server at the Internet service provider. When you use Mail to check for new messages, it accesses those messages on the server and downloads copies to your Mac so that you can peruse them at your leisure (even when you're offline). The messages are not deleted from the server until you delete them using Mail; when you do that, messages are moved into the Trash folder on your computer's hard drive. The local message cache means you can always access your messages quickly; however, a downside of IMAP accounts is that when you navigate your mail folders that are stored on the server, there is some lag time as Mail synchronizes its information with the state of the mailboxes on the server. 54. Configure a New Mail Account 
This behavior is distinct from Post Office Protocol (POP) mail accounts, in which Mail downloads all new messages to your computer and removes them from the server. With IMAP, you can always access your mail from any computer; with POP, you can properly read your mail only from a single computer. Furthermore, IMAP frees you from having to worry about what happens if your Mac crashes and you lose your data; you can simply connect again with a new or freshly rebuilt computer, and your messages are all still there. With POP, unless you've diligently backed up your data, your old mail messages are gone forever if your hard drive crashes. (See 143 Back Up Your Information for more on backing up your important data!)  NOTE POP accounts are easier for many ISPs to administer. Because the ISP doesn't have to store everybody's mail in POP accounts, they don't require as much server disk space or processing time.
POP is traditionally the most popular type of email account, although more and more Internet service providers are switching to IMAP because of its flexibility. POP accounts are still quite common; if your Internet service provider has set you up with one, it means that whenever you get new mail, the Mail application downloads it to your Mac and removes it from the server. You can configure Mail to leave messages on the server for a certain period of time, but after that period expires , the messages on the server will be deleted and you won't be able to access your mail from any computer but the one that downloaded the messages. The upside of this arrangement is that your own Mac will always be able to access the messages and their attachments quickly, whether online or offline, because the messages have already been downloaded completely; the messages will also never disappear from that Mac, as long as you make sure your Mac's data is backed-up . | 1. | Open the Mail Accounts Preferences
Launch the Mail application by clicking its icon in the Dock or by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. Mail consists of a single window with a column of mailboxes on the left, a listing of messages in the selected mailbox at the top, and the text of the selected message in the large pane below that. Until you set up your first email account, though, no messages will appear.
If you had previously set up a .Mac account (see 45 Sign Up for .Mac ), your @mac.com account is already set up, and you can skip the rest of this task and proceed to 55 Find and Read Messages and Attachments .
To set up a new .Mac, POP, IMAP, or Exchange mail account, select Preferences from the Mail menu and click the Accounts icon in the toolbar to open the Accounts pane, if it isn't already open.
| | 2. | Add a New Account
At the bottom of the list of accounts on the left, click the + icon to create a new mail account. A sheet appears that contains a series of configuration screens that will guide you through the creation of the new account.
| | 3. | Enter General Information Select .Mac, POP, Exchange , or IMAP from the Account Type drop-down menu, depending on the kind of email account your Internet service provider or network administrator has assigned for you. TIP Consult your ISP if you're not sure whether you have an IMAP or POP account; if you're configuring your .Mac mail account (@mac.com"><membername>@mac.com), select .Mac . Type a descriptive name for the account in the Account Description field. This name is what will appear in the Mailboxes drawer in Mail; choose a name that adequately describes what the account is for, such as Work-Related Email or My .Mac Account . In the fields provided, type your full name and your email address (or, if this is a .Mac account, the .Mac member name and password); these are used in constructing the return address on the messages you send out, so make sure they're accurate! Click Continue to move to the next step. | | 4. | Specify Incoming Mail Server If you're setting up a .Mac account, the incoming and outgoing mail servers are set to the .Mac defaults; you are shown an Account Summary screen reflecting your settings, and you can click Continue to complete the account creation process; skip to step 6 to fine-tune advanced mailbox behaviors. For POP, IMAP, and Exchange accounts, you must now specify the incoming mail server. Type the hostname of the incoming mail server provided by your ISP or network administrator. This server name is usually of a form similar to mail.somecompany.com (where somecompany.com is your company's or ISP's domain name). TIP You can specify either a hostname or an IP address for your incoming mail server. Using a hostname (such as mail.somecompany.com) is easier to type and to remember, but because it is dependent on an extra layer of networking architecture (DNS, the Domain Name System), there is a risk that your email service may be interrupted if DNS service is not available due to a network problem. If you specify an IP address (for instance, 112.113.114.115 ), your email service will be a little more fault-tolerant, as it no longer depends on DNS. In the fields provided, specify your account username and password. The user /account name is typically the same as the first part of your email address, before the @ symbol. For instance, if your address is johndoe@mac.com, the account name is johndoe . If you're creating an Exchange account, and your network administrator has given you the name of a server for Outlook Web Access (or an Internet Information Services server, or IIS), enter it in the Outlook Web Access Server field. This server may be the same as your incoming mail server. If you specify an Outlook Web Access server name, the Mail application will filter incoming mail to prevent special Exchange messages, such as meeting notifications, from appearing in your Inbox. TIP If you have an Exchange account, you might actually want Exchange messages such as meeting notifications to appear in your Inbox; such messages contain attachments that you can double-click to open them in iCal and add them to your personal calendar (see 97 Create an iCal Event ). To do this, simply set up the account as an IMAP account rather than an Exchange account. Click Continue to move to the next step. Your incoming mail server is checked for validity; if you have entered incorrect information in any of the fields, an error message will appear and you'll have to stay on this screen until you've corrected the information. | | 5. | Specify Outgoing Mail Server The next step is specifying the outgoing mail server (or SMTP servermeaning the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the delivery mechanism for handling messages that you send). Your ISP or company should have given you a server name to use; it might, in fact, be the same as your incoming mail server. If you have an outgoing mail server from your provider, enter the server name in the Outgoing Mail Server field. If the SMTP server requires authentication for sending mail, select the Use Authentication check box and specify a user name and password in the fields provided. NOTE If the provider's SMTP server supports secure SMTP (using Secure Sockets Layer , or SSL ), or if it uses a different IP port than the default 25, visit the Account Information tab of the Accounts pane in the Mail Preferences after setting up the account completely, and click the Server Settings button at the bottom; these advanced settings can be specified there. KEY TERM Spam Unsolicited commercial email. Some kinds of email accounts, notably accounts from free web hosting services, don't provide SMTP server access. This is a measure intended to fight spam , or unsolicited email broadcast through mail servers on the Internet. To defend against spam, many hosting services do not permit remote users to send mail through their SMTP servers at all. This means that even if you are setting up an account to fetch mail from a remote service on the Internet, you might have to set the account to use an SMTP server provided by your Internet service provider. Your ISP will almost certainly make a usable SMTP server available to you as a customer on its local network. If your ISP has not given you an outgoing mail server, you can use your .Mac account to gain access to the smtp.mac.com server, provided that you have set up your @mac.com account already in Mail; click the down arrow to show previously specified SMTP servers, and choose smtp.mac.com: <membername> , which uses your .Mac account information for authentication, from the list. The fields under Use Authentication are automatically filled in. Click Continue to move to the next step. Your outgoing mail server is checked for validity; if you have entered incorrect information in any of the fields, an error message will appear and you'll have to stay on this screen until you've corrected the information. | | 6. | Create the New Account
An Account Summary screen appears, showing you the settings you've specified so far. If they all look correct, click Continue to create the new account. (To make any changes, click Go Back to return to previous screens.) The account's mailboxes immediately appear in the Mailboxes pane of Mail, and you are given a button to Create Another Account if you wish, or to click Done to exit the account creation process.
| | 7. | Specify How to Handle Special Mailboxes Now, back in the Accounts pane of the Mail Preferences window, you can adjust the more detailed settings of your account. Click the Account Information tab if it's not already selected, and select your newly created account from the Accounts list. Click the Server Settings button to specify advanced options for the outgoing mail server, such as SSL encryption or an alternate server port. Click the Mailbox Behaviors tab. This brings up the page where you can fine-tune the behavior of mail that is automatically sorted into your Drafts, Sent, Junk , and Trash folders. For any of these mailboxes, you can elect to have their contents stored on the server rather than downloaded permanently to your computer. You can also specify when Mail should automatically delete messages in those foldersafter a day, a week, a month, whenever you quit Mail, or never. NOTE By default, Mail downloads messages in these special mailboxes and removes them from the server to save disk space. However, if you stick with this default behavior, you can't access the contents of those mailboxes from other computers. If you elect to keep the messages on the server, they will take up more space on the server (as well as being slower to access), but you can browse them from any computer. For instance, if you keep your Drafts mailbox on the server, you can begin a message with one computer, save it, and resume working on it in another computer before sending it. | | 8. | Specify Messages to Download for Offline Viewing
Click the Advanced tab. The Advanced page allows you to configure several additional options, including whether the account is enabled (appears in the Mailboxes drawer), whether your connections to the incoming mail server are secure (using SSL), and whether Mail should download copies of all your messages automatically so that you can read them even when you're not online. Use the Keep copies of messages for offline viewing drop-down menu to select whether Mail should keep all messages or just the ones you've read, and whether it should download attachments or not.
| TIP If you're setting up an IMAP account to access mail on a Unix shell system, you will probably have to specify the IMAP Path Prefix . On most servers, this prefix is typically mail . If you don't set this path, every file in your home directory on the server will appear as a mailbox in Mail!
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