Sending and Receiving Email

Although not as flashy as the Web, electronic mail is the most popular reason people use the Internet. Email lets you communicate with people all over the world. Unlike regular mail, your correspondents can be reading your messages within second after you send them, no matter whether the recipients are across the street or halfway around the world.

Mac OS X includes an email application simply named Mail (also called Mail.app, pronounced “mail-dot-app” to distinguish its application status), and it has an icon in the Dock for easy one-click access. With Mail you can check mail from multiple Internet email accounts, send and receive messages formatted with styled text and embedded pictures, and set up rules to automatically filter your mail based on content. Mail even has Safari’s KHTML rendering engine built right in, which will display HTML-formatted email easily.

Setting up email information and preferences

Before Mail can send and receive email for you, it must know your email address, password, and other information. If you’ve preconfigured a .Mac account, either by using the Setup Assistant or via the Internet Preferences pane, then Mail should open and begin to check said account. If not, then the first time you open Mail, it displays a dialog asking you to enter the necessary information (shown in Figure 6-31).

Figure 6-31: The first time you launch Mail, you are asked to type in your email settings.

Selecting an Email Application

Although Mac OS X includes the Mail application, you don’t have to use it. You may prefer to stick with another email application that you’re already using, or your company may require that you use a particular application. Email applications have their respective strength and weaknesses. Mail has an excellent junk-mail filtering capability. Microsoft’s Entourage is great all-around, but isn’t free. Other email apps include Eudora, Mulberry, Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Zoe. If you access an exchange server, you’ll need that capability built in — both Entourage and Mail.app include this feature-set.

Here’s the email information that Mail needs so it can send and receive your email:

• Full Name: The name you want people to see in their inbox when you send them an email.

• Email Address: The address where people send you email, for example: warren@ notmyrealemailaddress.com.

• Incoming Mail Server: The Internet name for the server from which Mail receives your email, for example: pop.earthlink.net.

• Account Type: This is determined by the provider of your email account, as explained in the sidebar “POP versus IMAP Email.” Choose the Exchange option if your email is provided by an exchange server. Exchange servers are usually reserved for business email, especially if you’re in a Windows environment; if you use one, you usually know. Average users, don’t worry about this.

• User Name: This item is usually the first part of your email address (the part before the @ symbol). In some cases, it might be different, so check if you are unsure.

• Password: This item is optional here. If you omit the password here, you must enter it every time you open Mail. But you are less likely to forget it if you need to check your mail from another computer and no one else will be able to get your email if you let them use your Mac OS X account.

• Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): The Internet name for the computer through which Mail sends your email, for example: smtp.earthlink.net.

After the above information is entered, Mail will verify the information by trying to contact your email servers. If this fails, you will be given a warning asking you to double-check your information. If it still won’t go through properly, Mail lets you continue anyway, but warns you that you won’t be able to send or receive mail. If you don’t know the information that Mail needs, check with your Internet service provider or other organization that provides your email service, such as Apple for a .Mac account, or EarthLink if you’ve got an EarthLink address. Don’t forget to make sure that your Mac has a valid Internet connection while setting up Mail.

When Mail opens for the first time, it asks you if you want to import any email from a previous email application. If you choose yes, you will be walked through this process, which involves telling Mail what your old email application was, and finding its relevant information. Entourage, Eudora, and Netscape are all importable to Mail. Don’t sweat it if you’ve skipped, or want to skip this step: you can choose to import old email at any time, by choosing to Import Mailboxes... under the File menu.

Also, after Mail is open, you can add additional email accounts; having more than one is common for lots of people nowadays. Choose Preferences under the Mail menu, and click on the accounts section. Click the plus sign button on the bottom of the window to add another account. To update or add information to an existing account, highlight its name in the column and click away at the options, as shown in Figure 6-32.

Figure 6-32: Customize your account in Mail’s preferences.

The Preferences window includes many other settings. Under the General section is where you tell OS X what its default email application is — so even if you don’t use Mail, you’ll still need to configure this here. Use the Junk Mail area to heavily customize how Mail deals with Junk Mail, or Spam. It can be turned off, or tweaked to very complicated levels. Mail’s fonts and colors can be played with here, as well as settings concerning Mail’s column views, what happens when you compose an email, and configuring a signature and rules for messages.

Using Mail’s viewer window

After your email information is set up, Mail displays a viewer window. It has a toolbar at the top, a list of messages below, and a message preview area at the bottom. A panel on the right side of the window lists mailboxes, which contain your messages (shown in Figure 6-33).

Figure 6-33: Mail’s main window. Notice the toolbar, the mailboxes drawer, and the one unread message.

POP versus IMAP Email

The provider of your email account may let you set it up as a POP account or an IMAP account. With a POP account (Post Office Protocol), you transfer (download) your incoming messages from the POP server on the provider’s computer to the Mail application’s database on your computer’s hard drive. Normally, your messages are deleted from the server after they have been transferred to your computer. Call your computer “Mac A.” This means that if you then check your email from a second computer (call it “Mac B”), the new messages that just showed up on the original computer (Mac A) will not show up on the second (Mac B), because they have been removed from the provider’s computer and are now only on Mac A. To help alleviate this disappearing email problem, now that many people check their email from more than one machine, most email programs let you choose to leave your POP messages on the server. Because the messages are still on the server, after they are checked, Mac A and Mac B will both get the messages. Doing this can, however, be quite hazardous to your email health, manifested by messages never, ever being deleted from the server, not for years and years. It’s often not obvious, but deleting a message from your inbox will often not actually delete it from the server, and messages that might not appear in any of your inboxes will sit on the server anyway. Guarding against this requires maintenance: the best thing you can do is have your email program automatically delete messages from the server after a certain period of time.

Does all that sound like pain in the rear? Enter IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol. With an IMAP account, all the mail is stored on the server, all the time. Mail is also stored on your computer, all the time, in fact, your computer and the IMAP server stay synchronized; they mirror each other. If you delete a message from your computer, it’s deleted from the server as well. This means that you can configure any number of computers to read your IMAP mail, and your inbox will look the same each time. Messages that have been replied to or forwarded will continue to show up that way, on machines that you didn’t actually send the message from. Furthermore, you can also store other folders on the server, so that items like drafts or sent messages are always present. IMAP is often defaulted to downloading only the email headers (subject lines) until you specify to read an entire message. While it makes for a fast inbox download, you can get stuck if you’re offline and haven’t fully downloaded a message that you need to read. And of course, if you accidentally delete your entire inbox, it will be deleted from the server too, and any of your other computers, when they connect.

To see a list of messages in any mailbox, select the mailbox by clicking its name in the mailbox pane. If you see only the message “No mailbox is selected” in the title bar of the Mail window, it means that nothing is selected. If you have more than one account set up, you’ll see a disclosure triangle next to the inbox, and in some cases the other folders. Instead of lumping all your messages from multiple accounts into one inbox, Mail gives you the option to view them each separately, by selecting each of the individual mini-inboxes independently. If you want to see everything at once, do click on the main inbox icon. Use the plus button to add a folder to the list. If you’ve got an IMAP account, you have the option of storing the folder on the server, or on your Mac, as shown in Figure 6-34. Use folders for organization and for storage. Click the action button for general control, like creating new message, or taking an account on- or offline manually. Mail shows the status of your connection right below the toolbar. Normally it displays the number of messages and the size of your inbox, or folder. When Mail senses that your computer has lost its Internet connection, it will change to read Offline.

Figure 6-34: If you’ve got an IMAP account, Mail gives you the option to save a folder on the server, or locally on your Mac, as shown here.

You can work with the messages listed in a viewer window as follows:

• Preview a listed message. Clicking a message in the list displays its contents in the preview pane. Doing this will cause an IMAP message to be fully downloaded, and change status to “read” if the message was new.

• Select messages in the list. Click any information listed for a message. Command-click additional messages to select them also, or Shift-click to select a range of messages. After messages are selected they can be dragged into different folders.

• Search the messages. Type in the toolbar’s Search box and use the adjacent pop-up menu to specify which part of each message to search. If Mail finds messages that meet your search criteria, it lists only those messages.

• Resize the list and preview areas. Drag the divider bar at the bottom of the list up or down.

• Hide or show the message preview area. Double-click the divider bar at the bottom of the list.

• Sort the list by a column. Click a column heading. The heading becomes highlighted to indicate that it is the sort key. Click the highlighted column heading to switch between forward and reverse sort order. Alternatively, you can choose a sort column and direction from the Sort submenu of the View menu.

• Rearrange columns. Drag a column heading left or right to move the column.

• Resize columns. Drag a column heading’s right borderline left or right to make the column narrower or wider.

• Show or hide columns. In the View menu, choose the appropriate command to show or hide the Number, Flags, Contents, or Message Sizes columns. The Read Status, From, and Date & Time columns always appear. The Buddy Availability column will bullet messages whose sender is signed into iChat, if they are in your address book.

• See more or fewer columns at once. Click the window’s Zoom button or resize the window.

Receiving mail

To get your mail, click the Get Mail button at the top of the viewer window, in the toolbar (or choose Get New Mail from the Mailbox menu). If you want to monitor the progress, choose Window Activity Viewer. You can also have Mail check for new mail automatically by setting how often you want this to happen in the Accounts section of Mail’s Preferences dialog.

The number of unread messages appears in parentheses next to the mailbox name in the mailbox panel. Unread messages are marked with a blue bullet in the list of messages below the buttons in a viewer window. The number of unread messages also appears superimposed, in red, on the Mail icon in the Dock.

You can read a message in the preview area at the bottom of a viewer window, but you won’t have to scroll as much if you open the message in its own window. To read a message in its own window, double-click it in the list of messages.

Composing messages

Of course, receiving messages is only half the fun. Mail gives you several options for dealing with your email correspondence. You can reply to messages you receive, forward them to other people, or compose new messages.

Replying to messages

To reply to a message you are reading, click the Reply button or the Reply All button at the top of the window. Reply and Reply All both create a new message. Reply addresses the new message only to the sender, and Reply All addresses the new message to the sender and everyone else who received the original message. Instead of clicking these buttons, you can choose equivalent commands from the Message menu.

The new message appears in a separate window. It has the same subject as the original message, except that “Re:” is prefixed to the reply subject. The body of the reply includes the text of the original message.

Type your reply message above the original message, and click the Send button (or choose Message Send Message) to send your message flying to its destination. If you’ve got the sound on, there’s a satisfying rocket-swoosh that accompanies a sent message.

Note

When replying to a message, especially a long one, it’s generally considered good netiquette (etiquette on the Internet) to trim the text of the original message down to the essentials. You can adjust how the text from the original message appears in the Fonts & Colors section of Mail’s Preferences dialog.

Forwarding messages

Forwarding a message sends a message that you have received to somebody else. If you’ve got to share a message with someone, click the Forward button at the top of the window (or choose Message Forward Message). The original message appears in a new window, with “Fwd:” prefixed to the subject. You need to supply the email address of the person to whom you are forwarding the message. You may want to add some introductory text above the forwarded message. Click the Send button (or choose Message Send Message) to send the message on its way.

Composing new messages

To compose a new message, as shown in Figure 6-35, click the Compose button at the top of a viewer window or choose File Compose Window.. Type each recipient’s email address separated by commas on the To line. On the Cc (carbon copy) line, add any additional recipients who should receive a copy of the message (but aren’t necessarily expected to reply). Type a subject on the Subject line and type the message in the bottom pane. If you want to get fancy, you can select different text styles, colors, and fonts from the Format menu. When you’re done, click Send.

Figure 6-35: A new message (click on the Compose button) looks like this.

Tip

Mail remembers the addresses of people to whom you have recently sent email. When you start to type an address on the To line, Mail autocompletes the address for you or provides a drop-down list if more than one address matches what you’re typing. If you don’t want to use Mail’s suggested address, just type over it. Mail also makes addresses draggable items — you can drag addresses, even from the body of an email text, into any of the sending fields that you wish.

Note

By default, Mail uses Rich Text Format (RTF) to compose messages so that you can send messages with styled text and inset pictures. Not all email programs can read this format, however. To change the format of an individual message, choose Make Plain Text from the Format menu when you are composing the message. If you know most of the people you send email to use email programs that don’t support formatted messages, you may want to change your preferred message format to plain text. Choose Mail Preferences, click Composing, and choose Plain Text from the Default message format pop-up menu.

Using the Address Book

The Mail application is linked to the Address Book application, which you can use to store frequently used email addresses and related contact information (such as phone numbers and birthdays). You can access the Address Book data by choosing Address Panel from the Window menu or by clicking the Address button in a message composition window. The Address Book can contain individual contacts, also know as virtual address cards (V-cards), and groups of contacts. Mail, along with applications like iChat and iCal, directly interfaces with the Address Book without actually launching the application, it instead accesses its database and reads the information. You can either choose the person’s name or group contact from the address list, as shown in Figure 6-36, or just start typing the name into the address field in your email, and the person will pop up. More on the address book in Chapter 18.

Figure 6-36: Choose an address from your Address Book by clicking the address button in the messages’ toolbar.

Modifying Toolbars in Mail

Many windows in the Mail application have toolbars, and these toolbars normally have buttons and other items displayed as icons with names. You can hide a toolbar or modify it in other ways by using the toolbar’s contextual menu or a toolbar item’s contextual menu. (You can display the toolbar’s contextual menu by Control-clicking the toolbar, and you can display a toolbar item’s contextual menu by Control-clicking the item.) You can modify the toolbars in Mail as follows:

• Hide the toolbar, or show it if it is hidden. Click the lozenge-shaped toolbar button in the upper-right corner of the window.

• Show items as icons with names, icons only, or names only. Choose the style you want from the toolbar’s contextual menu, or z-click the lozenge-shaped toolbar button in succession to view all the different options.

• Add items. Choose Customize Toolbar from the toolbar’s contextual menu, or from the View menu, or z-Option-click the lozenge-shaped toolbar button. Either action displays a dialog that contains items you can drag into the toolbar.

• Remove items. Choose Remove Item from the button’s contextual menu. Alternatively, z-drag an item away from the toolbar to see it vanish in a puff of smoke. If the Customize Toolbar dialog is displayed (as described in “Add items.” in this list), you don’t have to press Command to drag an item away from the toolbar.

• Move items. z-drag an item right or left to a different place on the toolbar. If the Customize Toolbar dialog is displayed (as described in “Add items.” in this list), you don’t have to press z to drag an item to another place on the toolbar.

Sending email attachments

In addition to text messages, you can send files with your email messages. Documents, archives of multiple files (which you can create in the Finder by using the Archive command), and other programs and files can be sent as attachments to an email message by using special protocols. Sending files as attachments can be useful if you’d like to send, for example, a Word document or a picture to somebody.

Adding an attachment in Mail is simple; just look for the paper clip. With new email (or reply email) open in its window, click the Attach button in the toolbar. In the dialog that appears, select the file you want to attach, and click Open. To attach multiple files, hold down Shift while selecting each one before clicking Open. You can attach additional files by clicking the Attach button again. Alternatively, you can just drag any file from the Finder into an open composition window, and Mail will attach the file.

Your attachment is represented in your message by an icon, as shown in Figure 6-37). If you select a picture to attach, that picture may be embedded in the body of your message. When you send the email message, attachments and embedded pictures go with it.

Figure 6-37: Mail displays attachments that you are sending inline with the text of the email.

Note

It’s generally considered good netiquette to send an attachment only to recipients who expect it or would want it. Large files can cause trouble when sent through email, whether it be the time it takes to download over a slow connection, or size limit restrictions imposed by someone’s email service provider.

Receiving attachments

When you receive a message containing an attachment, you see the icon of the attachment in the body of the message. If the attachment is a multimedia file (picture, sound, or video clip), you may see it embedded in the body of the message, depending on the format of the attached file. Double-click the icon or single-click the name to open the attachment. Control-clicking brings up a menu with the option to save the attachment to your hard drive, as opposed to just opening it. You can also drag an attachment icon or embedded picture from the body of the email message to the Desktop or a Finder window to save the file.

Note

In the Windows world, opening emails and their attachments is a risky business; it’s the most common way for a virus to be transmitted to a computer. Companies invest millions in email and virus protection. The top selling software for Windows machines are Virus protection utilities. Because most viruses are actually mini-Windows applications, on a Mac, they are completely harmless, and can’t harm your computer. Viruses that Macs catch are called Word macro viruses and come in the form of infected Microsoft Word documents. If you transfer a lot of these files with Windows users, some virus protection software like Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus is a good idea.

Junk mail

Junk mail in the form of email, or spam, stinks. It clogs up your inbox. It forces you to see offensive material. Worst of all, when your email application beeps to inform you of your new message, it’s a false alarm, just an advertisement for augmenting... something. Spammers can retrieve your email address from many places: anywhere you’ve posted it on the Web is searchable, and they’ll find it. Anything you’ve subscribed to or signed up for has probably sold a list with your name on it, to spammers. The only way to completely rid yourself of spam is to get a new email address, but this isn’t an option, or is just too inconvenient, for most. Because of the back-door techniques spammers use, there’s no real way of stopping them... yet. Even so, most email providers, even free ones like Yahoo! mail (http://mail.yahoo.com), have some protection. But it’s often not enough, and the junk still makes it to the inbox in droves.

Mail provides protection at the inbox level, that is, it employs a filter that identifies messages as junk before they make it there. Mail’s junk mail filter starts off in Training Mode. Under training mode, a message that Mail thinks is junk appears in brown in your inbox, and has a

header displayed with the message telling you that it has been identified as junk (shown in Figure 6-38). If Mail is correct, you can go ahead and delete the message. If Mail is not correct (a situation called a false-positive) you can click the button for Not Junk, and Mail will categorize it as a regular email. The great thing about the filter, is that it learns. After a while, its accuracy should be pretty good, and it shouldn’t be getting any false positives. When this is the case, you can switch from Training Mode to Automatic mode (under the Preferences) by telling Mail to put all its junk mail in a special junk mail inbox, and you shouldn’t see too much junk mail in your inbox after that. For advanced customization, click the Advanced button in the Junk Mail preferences to manually edit the junk rules (shown in Figure 6-39).

Figure 6-38: Mail thinks this is a junk-mail message.

Figure 6-39: Change the junk-mail filter from training mode to automatic by choosing the option in the junk-mail preferences.

If you’ve been clicking on all those “take-me-off-your-list-and-you’ll-never-get-spam-again” links at the bottom of your junk mails, congrats-you’ve just informed the spammer that there is a warm body at the end of your email address, and inadvertently subscribed to even more junk mail. In most cases, spam comes from a fake address, meaning you can’t reply to it. If the address is legitimate, Mail provides a way of bouncing the message back to the sender; on the spammer side it appears that your email address is not a valid one, and you might get taken off of the list. To enable easy bouncing, customize the toolbar to show the Bounce button. To bounce a message to the sender, click the Bounce button while the offending message is selected, heed the warning Mail gives you, and off it goes. If you get a message saying that you got a returned mail, the bounce didn’t work.

Threading

One of the more frustrating organizational issues is to easily locate all the messages from a single email conversation. Mail incorporates a feature called threading: when any message in a conversation is selected, all the others are highlighted as well! You can turn this feature on or off in the View section of Mail’s preferences as well as change the highlight color, as shown in Figure 6-40.

Figure 6-40: Selecting one message will subtly highlight other messages from the same email conversation.