Set up a New Account or Edit an Existing Account

Use Mail preferences to create new mail accounts, edit existing accounts, and customize Mail's behavior. You may have more than one email account in your life. For instance, you might have one that is strictly for business, one for friends and family, one for your lover, and one for your research. Mail can manage them all for you, even if they are all on different servers.

To open Preferences and get the Accounts pane

From the Mail menu, choose "Preferences…," then click Accounts.

The Accounts list will show all the email accounts you've created.

To remove an account, select its name in the Accounts pane, then click the sign. Or instead, you could make an account inactive; use the "Advanced" pane.

To edit an existing account, single-click the account in the list, then see the following pages for detailed descriptions of the options.

To create a new account, click the + button at the bottom of the Accounts pane. You'll see the sheet shown below.

Account Type pop-up menu: Choose ".Mac" if you're setting up an email account that you created at the Mac.com website.

If you're setting up an account that comes from some other service provider, they can tell you if they use POP or IMAP (most likely POP).

In the Account Description field, type a name that will identify this account in the Mailbox Sidebar. You can name it anything"Lover Boy," "Research Mailing List," "earthlink," etc.

Enter your Full Name. This is what will identify you to recipients.

For a POP account, you need to enter your email address. Include the @ symbol and the domain name ("ratz.com," "typosuction.com," etc.)

If you're setting up a .Mac account, User Name and Password are the same ones you chose when you signed up for your account. You should have received an email from Apple verifying this information.

If you're setting up a POP account, your User Name and Password may have been assigned by your provider, or they may have been chosen by you. These are not necessarily the same user ID and password that you use to access your email. If necessary, ask your provider for the user ID and password information for your account.

Incoming Mail Server: If your account type is .Mac, the host name is automatically filled in with "mail.mac.com."

If you're setting up another account type, such as a POP account, the mail service provider can tell you what name to use. Tell them you need the "incoming" mail server name, also known as the "POP address." (It's probably something like "mail.domainname.com," where "domainname" is the name in your email address, such as mail.ratz.com.)

Outgoing Mail Server: No matter where your email account comes from, the outgoing mail server (the SMTP Host) for every account is always the one you're paying money to for your Internet serviceit's your Internet Service Provider's name, such as "mail.providername.com" because that's how your email is going out. Mac.com is not the SMTP host for your Mac.com account. (Well, technically it can work, but you'll have fewer problems if you don't use it.)

My friend Joannie made up a great mnemonic for SMTP: Send Money To Person.

If "smtp.provider.com" or "mail.provider.com" don't work, call your provider and ask them what the SMTP Host is called.

When that process is finished and you once again see the Accounts pane, click the Mailbox Behaviors tab of the window. The items in this tab change depending on whether you're creating an IMAP account (such as .Mac) or a POP account (most others).

These are the IMAP options. The advantage to storing items on the server is that you can access them from anywhere in the world; they're not stored on your computer.
If you have a .Mac email acount, you can go to www.mac.com and log into your account on any computer that has a browser and an Internet connection.

These are the POP options. These refer to the messages that are in the Mail program and stored on your Mac, not on a remote server.

If you're creating an IMAP or .MAC account, the following options are shown in the Advanced pane:

Enable this account: Check to make the account active. Uncheck it to make the account inactive, which does not delete the accountit just tells Mail to ignore it for now.

See the opposite page for the POP options.

Include when automatically checking for new mail: UNcheck this box when you want to prevent Mail from checking email at this address. This is useful if you have several email addresses and you choose not to check some accounts as often as others. You can always manually check for messages in any accountuse the "Get New Mail" option in the Mailboxes menu.

Compact mailboxes automatically: "Compacting" a mailbox is the same as deleting trashed messages. When you select and delete messages on an IMAP server, they don't really get deletedthey get placed in a "Deleted" folder on the server. The server stores these deleted files for a user--specified length of time before they are erased. Apple doesn't give you a choice about this with your .Mac email accountthe files you delete will be erased immediately when you quit the Mail application; this frees up your email space on their server.

Keep copies of messages for offline viewing: This menu offers options for copying email messages from an IMAP server onto your own Mac.

"All messages and their attachments" will copy all of your email, plus any attachments you were sent, to your hard disk.
"All messages, but omit attachments" will copy the body of the email messages, but not attachments. You will have to choose to download any attachments.
"Only messages I've read" will only copy and store messages if you've read them. You can mark a letter as "Unread" or "Read" whether you really have or notuse the Message menu.
"Don't keep copies of any messages" will not copy any of your mail to your hard disk. This option provides you with extra security and privacy if other people have access to your computer. If you choose this option, be aware that some IMAP servers will eventually erase messages that have been stored for a user--specified length of time (thirty days, generally), whether you've read them or not.

If you're creating a POP account, the following options are shown in the Advanced tab:

Enable this account: Check to make the account active. Uncheck it to make the account inactive, which does not delete the accountit just tells Mail to ignore it for now.

See the opposite page for the IMAP options.

Include when automatically checking for new mail: UNcheck this box to prevent Mail from checking email at this address. This is useful if you have several accounts and you choose not to check some email as often as others. You can always manually check for messages in any accountuse the "Get New Mail" option in the Mailboxes menu.

Remove copy from server after retrieving a message: POP servers prefer that you choose the option to delete a message from the server as soon as it is downloaded to your Mac. Uncheck it only when you need to temporarily keep a copy of your mail on the server. In the pop-up menu you'll find several options for lengths of time to store messages.

Prompt me to skip messages over __ KB: When checking for mail, you can choose to skip over messages that are larger than you want to receive. This can eliminate unsolicited attachments. Enter the maximum file size that you'll permit Mail to download. A typical text email message with no attachments is about 1 to 10 KB (kilobytes). Messages in HTML format (the fancy ones with nice type and graphics) might be 30 to 60 KB.

All done?

When all the "Accounts" preferences are set, click the red Close button (or click any other icon in the toolbar). A sheet drops down and asks if you want to save the changes. Your new account appears in the Mailbox Sidebar, under the "Inbox" icon. If you don't see it, perhaps the Inbox is closed upsingle-click the disclosure triangle to display the accounts, as shown below.