55. Find and Read Messages and Attachments  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 54 Configure a New Mail Account
 SEE ALSO 56 Send a Message 57 Filter Junk Mail
It won't be long before you have received your first few email messages. Indeed, chances are that before you know it, you'll be getting more than you can handle (particularly in the form of junk mail or spam , which the Mail program can filter for youas you see in 57 Filter Junk Mail ). The first function of the Mail application is to allow you to read these messages, as well as to open any attached files that might come with the messages. Within your email account (and each additional account, if you happen to have more than one), you have a number of mailboxeswhich can be thought of as "folders" within your email account. The primary mailboxwhich each account hasis the Inbox . The rest of the mailboxes depend on the types of accounts you have; but the most common important mailboxes are Sent, Trash , and Junk , as well as the Drafts mailbox. The Sent mailbox holds every message you send; the Trash mailbox contains all the messages you delete; and Junk has the messages that the Mail application deems junk mail. The Drafts mailbox is used to hold partially completed messages while you're composing them, and Sent turns into Sending and receives a copy or each outgoing message while Mail is attempting to deliver it. Additionally, you can create as many other mailboxes as you wanteither stored locally on your Mac or remotely on the server (for IMAP accounts). New messages always appear in your Inbox, unless they are moved elsewhere by an automated rule, as you will see in 58 Create a Mailbox . | 1. | Open the Mailbox You Want to Read All your available email accounts and all their associated mailboxes appear in the Mailboxes pane of the Mail application, the column at left. (If this pane is not visible, choose Show Mailboxes from the View menu.) Depending on the types of accounts you have and what options for the special mailboxes you have already specified, the mailboxes are sorted according to their importance and how likely you are to need access to them. Your Inboxes appear at the top of the list, all grouped together into a single unified In box; you can either expand the In mailbox (using the triangle control to its left) to view each individual account's Inbox, or you can click the In mailbox itself to see all the messages in all your Inboxes at once. 55. Find and Read Messages and Attachments   NOTE Each mailbox indicates how many unread messages are in it. If there are any unread messages, the number of them appears in an oval next to the mailbox name . If there are no unread messages in the mailbox, no number appears. Click the mailbox you want to view; the messages in that mailbox appear listed in the Message List pane. The number of total messages in the mailbox appears in the title bar of the Mail application; in this example, there are eight messages in the mailbox, four of which are unread (as indicated by the blue dot next to each unread message). | | 2. | View a Message Click a message's subject to view that message in the Message pane below. TIP If you prefer, double-click a message in the Message List pane to open the message in a separate window. Viewing messages in a separate window can be useful if you prefer to see only a list of message subjects, so that you can see as many messages as possible, or so that you can control messages without downloading them (for instance, if you're on a very slow network link). Double-click the horizontal divider between the panes to hide the Message pane and create a larger Message List pane. The top part of the message consists of the headers , which are several lines of information describing who sent the message, to whom it was addressed, when it was sent, and the subject (shown in bold), as well as a variety of other optional pieces of data. Then, below a horizontal dividing line, the body of the message itself appears. Email messages can come in two styles: Plain Text and Rich Text. Rich Text, a designation that includes HTML and inline attachments, allows a message to have text in custom colors and fonts and styles; however, these messages are also larger and take longer to download. For this reason, many messagessuch as informational messages from web-based servicesare sent as Plain Text. TIP Not all available columns are shown in the message list pane. You can enable more columns by choosing them from the View, Columns submenu, or by right-clicking (or Control +clicking) the column header bar, and selecting new column names . For example, in a grouped mailbox or Smart Mailbox that shows messages from many mailboxes, you might turn on the Mailbox column to see where each message comes from. Often, Plain Text messages are laid out to organize text into tabular format, such as in billing reports that list line-items and a total. However, for this kind of layout to work properly, you must tell the Mail application to use a monospaced font for Plain Text messages. Otherwise, the letters will all be different widths and won't line up properly. To do this, open the Mail Preferences window, click the Fonts & Colors icon, and select the Use fixed-width font for plain text messages check box. | | 3. | View an Attachment In addition to Plain Text or Rich Text content, an email message can also contain one or more attachments files, folders, or applications that are sent along with the message for you to open and save on your own computer. Email attachments have become the de facto standard method for transferring pictures, Word and Excel documents, and ZIP archives around the office or across the Internet. NOTE Rich Text messages can have pictures and other types of data embedded directly into the body of the message; to view or save these items, double-click them or drag them from their position in the message to your Desktop or a Finder window (or even straight into another application, such as Preview ). However, for both Plain Text and Rich Text messages, all attachments are listed in the header portion of the message, so that you can examine the filename and type of each attachment. If an email message has an attachment, you will see a line in the headers area noting how many attachments there are, as well as a Save button menu, and (if the attachments are pictures) a Slideshow button as well. Click the triangle to the left of this line to expand the attachments summary; double-click any listed attachment to open it in its default application. You can also right-click (or Control +click) the attachment icon to choose which application to open it in, just as you would in the Finder. If the message contains a series of attached pictures, click the Slideshow button to begin an automatic full-screen slideshow of the pictures. A translucent toolbar at the bottom of the screen gives you the option to play or pause the slideshow, skip forward or back one picture at a time, show all pictures in an index sheet (similar to the "All Windows" mode of Expos ), import the pictures one at a time into iPhoto, and more. | | 4. | Save an Attachment If you simply view an attachment by double-clicking it, it will open in its associated application; but if you want to save the attachment permanently on your hard disk, move it from the Mail application into the Finder. Click and drag any attachment icon from the expanded header area onto the Desktop or into a Finder window; the green + symbol next to the mouse pointer as you drag indicates that a copy of the item will be saved wherever you drop it. TIP Choose Save All from the Save button menu to choose a location and have the Mail application save all the message's attachments to that location at once. Any attachments that are pictures are listed by their thumbnail icons and filenames in the Save button menu. Select an individual picture file to save it in a selected location, or choose Add to iPhoto to send all the message's picture attachments into your iPhoto Library. (See 87 About iPhoto and Digital Photography for more about using iPhoto to manage your photographs.) | | 5. | Find a Message You can quickly locate a message if you know any text that appears in its Subject line or contents, or if you know to or from whom it was sent. Just type the desired text into the Search bar (the white oval in the upper right), and the mailbox you're currently viewing is immediately filtered to show only the messages that match what you've typed, sorted by a "rank" that reflects how closely the messages' contents matched your search text. TIP Click the gray circled X at the right end of the Search bar to clear the contents of the field and go back to viewing your mailbox normally. The results of the search are displayed in the same manner as a Finder search, with control buttons at the top of the window allowing you to specify whether the search terms should apply to the From, To , or Subject fields, or the entire message's text, and a menu to select the mailbox or hierarchy in which to search. You can even save a message grouping resulting from a search as a Smart Mailbox, using the Save button (see 59 Create a Smart Mailbox That Automatically Contains Certain Types of Messages for more details on this process). Click the magnifying glass icon at the left end of the Search bar to select what part of the message to search. By default, Mail searches the entire contents of all your messages; if you want to narrow the results down still further, you can select From, To , or Subject from the magnifying-glass list to limit the searching to one of those header fields. You can also tell Mail to search messages in all your mailboxes instead of just the mailbox you're currently viewing. | | 6. | Transfer a Message to a Different Mailbox
To help you organize your communications more efficiently , you can create new mailboxes in any of your accounts, either those on your local hard disk or those on the remote server (for .Mac, IMAP, or Exchange accounts); see 65 Create a Mailbox for instructions. Mail lets you sort your messages into your various mailboxes by simply dragging and dropping. Click any message and drag it to the mailbox you want to move it to. You can move messages from any mailbox to any other mailbox (except for Smart Mailboxes), including mailboxes in other accounts.
| TIP The Mail application supports a form of the "spring-loaded folders" feature used by the Finder: To move a message into a mailbox that's deeply nested within other mailboxes, drag the message to the top mailbox and hold the mouse pointer there until the mailbox expands. Repeat for a mailbox inside that one, if necessary, until the target mailbox is visible. Then drop the message into the mailbox where you want it to go.
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