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Two Accounts, One Mail

The Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:41:02 -0500

I’ve always used Mail’s POP3 settings to manage my Gmail account, and I’ve been able to remain a one-account guy. But the university where I work wants me to use their servers for my work email. Mail successfully synced up with the provided IMAP Account; however, I now find my main inbox doing double duty. During a busy day, it becomes difficult to separate messages at a glance. I can click on the message and check the recipient, or click on the mailbox and do the subtraction, but both of those are cumbersome. Worst of all, I also find myself occasionally replying to messages using the wrong account. Any suggestions?

We hope we’re not overlooking something in your letter, but it sounds like the problem is just that you’re only looking at the top-level inbox instead of the inboxes for each of your accounts. Click the little arrow next to the word Inbox, and you should see an inbox for each of your accounts. Each inbox has a number of unread messages by it. Then just click each one to see the messages sent to that email address.

When you have more than one email account in Mail, click these triangles to split up the Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Trash mailboxes by account.

Mail’s Dock icon displays the total number of new messages in all your accounts (unless you’ve disabled that feature in Mail > Preferences > General), but an app called DockStar ($9.95, www.ecamm.com) can customize that, if you want to see a separate unread-messages number for each of your accounts.

Another iPhone Security Risk, This Time with Mail

Christine Chan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:14:07 -0500

Despite fixing the SMS security risk with the latest 3.0.1 firmware, it seems that there is yet another security risk with the iPhone, this time involving your precious email.

It seems that if you search for a deleted message's subject line in Spotlight, it will show up, though it will take several attempts to actually view the content of the message. This may leave the content of the email messages vulnerable to hackers and thieves, or just those significant others that may check for incriminating emails.

But word is that the upcoming 3.1 firmware will patch this up. In the meantime, you can try rebooting the phone, loading messages several times or just simply waiting.

Via MacNN

Building Your Address Book Without  Any Paste

Susie Ochs — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:24:00 -0500

I recently switched from a PC to a Mac, and I’m not used to my email and contacts apps being separate, like Mail and Address Book are. Is there a quick way to pull contact information from an email and put it in Address Book, without a bunch of copying and pasting?

You’ve probably noticed that Mail can pull names and email addresses from Address Book when you’re composing a message. It’s almost as easy to send contact info from Mail to Address Book when you’re reading messages too—no copying and pasting required.

First, mouse over a name or email address in the From or To line of a message header—it’ll be highlighted in blue, with a white arrow to the right. Click that arrow for a menu, and choose Add To Address Book. Address Book will open in case you want to add more information to the contact’s card, or file the card in a group, but you can ignore the Address Book window for now and stay in Mail.

Now, what if the contact info you want isn’t in the header, but in the body of the email, or in the signature? No worries. Just mouse over a name, phone number, or email address, and Mail will draw a gray dotted line around it, with a gray arrow to the right. Click that arrow for a menu and select Create New Contact, or Add To Existing Contact. If you choose the latter, a pop-up window will appear showing Mail’s best guesses for what you want to add, and to which contact. If it guessed the wrong Address Book contact, just click the black arrow next to the name and choose the one you want. The rest of the information is in green, and you can click it to change or delete it, or adjust any of the drop-downs for the categories. When you’re satisfied, click the Add To Address Book button.

Indev Software Mail Act-On 2

Ray Aguilera — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:03:00 -0600

For Mail power users, Act-On is a must-have. Go. Download. Now.

Apple Mail gets the job done, but there are a few crucial features missing. Rules can sort messages as they arrive, but Mail doesn’t offer much to help you organize messages after the fact. Indev Software’s Mail Act-On is a hugely useful Mail plug-in to do just that and much more. Using rules and user-configurable keystrokes, Mail Act-On can easily tame even the most unruly inbox. And compatibility with Indev’s MailTags (4 Stars, Sept/08) turns Mail Act-On into an organizational powerhouse.

At its core, Mail Act-On is a keyboard-based front end for Mail rules. Act-On will allow you to invoke rules on the fly via a pop-up menu or with a custom keystroke. After installing the plug-in, your Rules pane in Mail Preferences will sport three tabs. Inbox Rules will show all your standard Mail rules. Outbox Rules will show rules for sent messages—handy for separating your outgoing personal messages from work-related ones or keeping related messages together. Keystroke Rules (our favorite feature) are rules that you have designated to run when you use a custom keystroke. We found them most useful as a method for quickly filing messages into the appropriate mailbox.

Even with our relatively flat structure of only a few mailboxes, being able to easily separate out the actionable emails from the press releases and interoffice messages without leaving the keyboard allows us to whizz through our overstuffed inbox. Act-On makes it easy to navigate mail. Hitting F1 activates the plug-in’s floating window, where you can apply rules, move or copy messages, or navigate to specific mailboxes. The window also searches as you type, making navigating complicated mailbox structures or lengthy rule lists incredibly easy.

Working with Stationery in Mail

Thomas Myer — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:40:53 -0500

If you’re anything like me, you use Mail, the all-purpose email application for Mac OS X, about 100 times a day. Most of the messages you send and receive are probably the vanilla-text email variety, with a few HTML emails thrown in for good measure. Wouldn’t it be great if you could add some pizazz to your own emails, without having to learn HTML?

That’s where Stationery templates come in. Stationery templates let you add a personal touch to your messages in Mail by clicking and dragging. With stationery, you can include photos, custom styles and more to produce professional-looking emails that can be used in a variety of settings: dinner invites, summaries of vacation trips, and more.

Using stationery is pretty simple—when you create a new message, click the Show Stationery button in the upper right hand corner of your New Message window (pictured below).

Once you do that, you’ll see a variety of template categories that you can browse, including templates for birthdays, announcements, sentiments, and more (pictured below):

To pick a particular template, click its icon. Mail will apply the template to your message. In the example below, I’ve chosen the Postcard template.

Once you’ve loaded a stationery template, you can click the Photo Browser in the toolbar and start dragging images from iPhoto to the placeholders in the template.

As you can see from the screenshot below, I’ve included some shots I took with my iPhone when we vacationed in Southern Ohio a few weeks ago—you can see images of a church in Zanesville, some wild flowers in the McConnelsville area, and the mill at Stockport.

I’ve also started working on new text, which you can do simply by clicking and editing the appropriate text fields.

Once you’ve got the text and images just right, add a subject line and recipients, and send it. The stationery template and added images will be attached to the message and sent to the recipients like any other email.

What if some of your recipients aren’t lucky enough to use Mail? Not to worry—most email browsers (like Gmail, pictured below) can still open the attached message and display it as you intended it.

Color-Coding New Email

Scott Rose — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:33:38 -0500

Create a rule in Mail to automatically assign background colors to incoming messages.

I just switched from Entourage to Mail, and I can’t figure out how to use colors to highlight the email messages that I receive, as I could in Entourage by selecting a category (e.g., friends are purple, family is green, and so on).

To manually apply a background color to an email, click the message in your viewer window, choose Format > Show Colors to bring up the color picker, and select the one that you want. If you find yourself using the same colors repeatedly, you can “bookmark” a color in the color picker by dragging the large rectangle that represents your color onto one of the small boxes that appears below. Unlike in Entourage, your background colors only appear within the ist of messages, and not in the actual window of the message itself.

To automatically apply a background color to incoming emails, you can set up a rule in Mail to color email messages if they’re from a certain person or Address Book group. Let’s say that you’ve already created a group in your Address Book called Family and dragged all of your family contacts into that group. Now you want any incoming messages from those contacts to be highlighted green. Select Mail > Preferences, click the Rules button, and choose Add Rule. Give the rule a description, select the condition “Sender is member of Group,” and then choose the group Family. Underneath “Perform the following actions,” choose “Set Color” and “of background” from the drop-downs, and select the color you’d like.