Lion Mountain Apple Mail in
Check for Updates Make sure you have the latest information! TidBITS Publishing Inc. Take Control of v1.1 Apple Mail in Mountain Lion $15 Joe Kissell Help Catalog Feedback Blog Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Table of Contents Read Me First Updates and More .....................................................................5 Basics .....................................................................................6 What’s New in Version 1.1 ..........................................................8 What Was New in Version 1.0 .....................................................9 Introduction Quick Start to Controlling Apple Mail Learn What’s New in Mountain Lion Mail Learn about Email Protocols POP .......................................................................................13 IMAP .....................................................................................14 Switching from POP to IMAP .....................................................15 iCloud ....................................................................................16 SMTP .....................................................................................17 Exchange ...............................................................................17 Set Up Your Accounts Use IMAP with Gmail................................................................20 Account Setup Tips ..................................................................29 Read Incoming Messages Check Your Email.....................................................................31 Understand and Customize the Interface ....................................32 Follow Conversations ...............................................................39 Work with VIPs .......................................................................45 Manage Incoming Message Formats ...........................................46 Use Data Detectors .................................................................48 Work with Message Flags ..........................................................50 File and Organize Messages ......................................................51 Deal with Incoming Attachments ...............................................54 Manage Notifications ................................................................58 2 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Stop Spam .............................................................................61 Address Addressing Put Addresses in Contacts ........................................................65 Address an Email Message ........................................................65 LDAP Server ...........................................................................68 Access Hidden Address Fields ....................................................68 Address Messages to Groups.....................................................69 Handle Previous Recipients .......................................................70 Choose an Account or Address to Send From...............................72 Compose and Send Messages Handle Message Formatting ......................................................75 Personalize Email with Signatures ..............................................78 Set Message Priority ................................................................80 Work with Outgoing Attachments ..............................................81 Reply to Messages ...................................................................86 Forward Messages as Attachments.............................................88 Use Mail Stationery..................................................................88 Sign and Encrypt Messages Learn When and Why to Sign or Encrypt Messages ......................91 Understand S/MIME Basics .......................................................94 Get a Personal Certificate .........................................................97 Sign or Encrypt a Message........................................................98 Read Signed or Encrypted Mail.................................................100 Manage Your Mailboxes Mailbox Basics.......................................................................103 Special Mailboxes ..................................................................103 Create a New Mailbox.............................................................107 Arrange, Hide, and Show Mailboxes .........................................108 Find Your Messages Perform a Basic Search ..........................................................109 Search for a Phrase ...............................................................113 Use Boolean Expressions ........................................................114 Search By Date Range............................................................114 3 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Search within the Current Message ..........................................115 Work Smarter with Smart Mailboxes.........................................115 Automate Mail with Rules Create a Rule ........................................................................119 Use Multiple Conditions and Actions .........................................121 Rule Examples ......................................................................121 Running Rules on Command....................................................122 Fix Mail Problems Fix Incoming Mail Problems.....................................................125 Fix Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Problems ..........................................128 Fix Mailbox Problems .............................................................135 Fix Searching Errors ..............................................................136 Back Up and Restore Your Email Back Up and Restore with Time Machine ...................................138 Use Another Backup Program ..................................................139 Do a Cloud-to-Cloud Backup ...................................................140 Export a Mailbox....................................................................140 About This Book Ebook Extras.........................................................................142 About the Author ...................................................................143 Shameless Plug .....................................................................143 About the Publisher................................................................144 Copyright and Fine Print Featured Titles 4 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Read Me First Welcome to Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion, version 1.1, published in August 2012 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. This book was written by Joe Kissell and edited by Michael E. Cohen. Mail, Apple’s full-featured email application, is the most popular way for Mac OS X users to send and receive email. This book helps you get more out of Mail by explaining its most important features, providing useful tips, and solving problems. If you want to share this ebook with a friend, we ask that you do so as you would with a physical book: “lend” it for a quick look, but ask your friend to buy a copy for careful reading or reference. Discounted classroom and Mac user group copies are available. Copyright © 2012, Joe Kissell. All rights reserved. Updates and More You can access extras related to this book on the Web (use the link in Ebook Extras, near the end; it’s available only to purchasers). On the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy any subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and—usually— Mobipocket. (Learn about reading this ebook on handheld devices at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/device-advice.) • Read postings to the ebook’s blog. These may include new tips or information, as well as links to author interviews. At the top of the blog, you can also see any update plans for the ebook. If you bought this ebook from the Take Control Web site, it has been added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually; see Ebook Extras. 5 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Basics Here are a few rules of the road that will help you read this ebook: • Menus: Where I describe choosing a command from a menu in the menu bar, I use an abbreviated description. For example, the abbreviated description for the menu command that creates a new message in Mail is “File > New Message.” • Links: All blue text in this ebook is hot, meaning you can click (or tap) it, just like a link on the Web. If you click a link to switch to a different part of the ebook, you can return quickly to where you were if your ebook reader offers a “back” feature. For example, if you use iBooks in iOS to read the EPUB version of this ebook, you can tap the “Back to” link at the lower left of the screen (you may have to tap the screen once to activate the navigation controls). Or, if you use Preview on the Mac to read the PDF version of this ebook, you can choose Go > Back (or press Command-[ ). • Right-clicking (Control-clicking): Some actions in Mail are accomplished by pointing at an item, performing a secondary click (or tap) on your mouse, trackball, or trackpad, and then choosing a command from a contextual pop-up menu. The original (and still functional) way to perform a secondary click on a Mac is to hold down the Control key while clicking—that is, to Control-click. A multi-button input device (including an Apple Magic Mouse or Mighty Mouse) can be configured so that pressing on one side (or button) produces a standard click and pressing on the other produces a secondary click. Similarly, the Magic Trackpad and the built-in trackpads on Apple laptops can be configured to produce a secondary click in various ways, such as double-tapping. In this book, I say “right-click (Control-click),” by which I mean “do whatever you have to do to display the contextual menu.” If you prefer a different method and your input device supports it, feel free to display the contextual menu in the way that seems best to you. • Multiple ways to perform a command: You can perform many commands in Mail in more than one way—for example, using a toolbar button, a menu command, or a keyboard shortcut. In this book, for the sake of brevity, I mention only one way to perform each command. In general, I describe the most obvious 6 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! way of doing things—toolbar buttons are easier to find than menu commands (as long as they’re in their default locations), and menu commands are more obvious than keyboard shortcuts—but choose whichever approach suits you best. • Customizing keyboard shortcuts: If a menu command doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut listed, note that you can add your own shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts view of the Keyboard & Mouse pane of System Preferences (see File and Organize Messages). • Customizing toolbars: You can customize the toolbars for Mail’s various windows to your liking (adding, rearranging, or moving controls) by right-clicking (Control-clicking) on a toolbar and choosing Customize Toolbar from the contextual menu. • System Preferences: I sometimes discuss settings in System Preferences that you may want to adjust. To open System Preferences, click its icon in the Dock or choose Apple > System Preferences. When the System Preferences window opens, click the icon of the pane whose settings you want to adjust. I refer to these panes using a shortcut such as “open the iCloud pane of System Preferences.” • Application preferences: I sometimes refer to preferences in an application that you may want to adjust. Don’t confuse an application’s preferences with the system-wide settings found in System Preferences. To access an application’s preferences, choose Application Name > Preferences. For example, in Mail, you would choose Mail > Preferences. • Path syntax: This book occasionally uses a path to show the location of a file or folder in your file system. For example, Mac OS X stores most utilities, such as Terminal, in the Utilities folder. The path to Terminal is: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. The slash at the beginning of the path tells you to start from the root level of the disk. You will also see paths that begin with ~ (tilde), which is a shortcut for the user’s home directory. For example, if a person with the username joe wants to install fonts that only he can access, he would install the fonts in his ~/Library/Fonts folder, which is just another way of writing /Users/joe/Library/Fonts. 7 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! • User Library: The library folder mentioned in the previous paragraph, ~/Library, is normally invisible in Mountain Lion. To see it, hold down the Option key and choose Go > Library in the Finder. • Big cats: I frequently mention features specific to a particular version of Mac OS X, which Apple usually refers to by their “big cat” code names: ‣ Mountain Lion: 10.8 ‣ Lion: 10.7 ‣ Snow Leopard: 10.6 ‣ Leopard: 10.5 To find out which version of Mac OS X your Mac is running, choose Apple > About This Mac. What’s New in Version 1.1 This minor update addresses a few issues in Mail that came to light in the weeks immediately after Mountain Lion’s release. I changed the following: • Added a sidebar Run Unsupported Plug-ins, which is also referenced in the discussion of MailFollowUp in the sidebar Follow Up on a Message You Sent • Updated the sidebar Where Attachments Live and How to Delete Them to correct the location of the Mail Downloads folder in Mountain Lion • In Choose an Account or Address to Send From, added a link to a TidBITS article discussing differences in the way Mountain Lion Mail chooses a From account, as well as a Perturbed Replies sidebar • Removed obsolete disclaimers about the availability of Mountain Lion-compatible versions of several plug-ins (QuoteFix, Mail ActOn, MsgFiler, and MailHub) • Included a sidebar AppleScripts and Mail explaining where AppleScripts must now be located to run as actions in Mail rules 8 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! What Was New in Version 1.0 In this revised edition, I covered all the new features found in the Mountain Lion version of Mail (6.x). You can see a list of those features in Learn What’s New in Mountain Lion Mail. I also removed the discussion of features that no longer exist, and changed various terms to match Apple’s new usage in Mountain Lion—for example, Contacts is the new name for the app formerly known as Address Book, and Calendar is what we now call iCal. Other than Mountain Lion-related changes, however, I added no substantive new content since Take Control of Apple Mail in Lion. 9 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Introduction Every time Apple updates OS X to a major new version, one of the first things I do is open Mail and choose Help > What’s New in Mail? to find out what features have changed since the last big release. This time, for Mail version 6.x in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, that window shows just three changes: VIP senders, notifications for new messages, and sharing Web pages in different formats. My initial reaction was, “Wow, that’s not much of a change.” But then, as I began poking around, my reaction changed to, “Hey, wait a minute—why didn’t Apple mention this…and this and this?” I quickly found several other important differences from the Lion version of Mail. This has been Apple’s way for years: Change things but don’t mention what has changed or why. Add features, remove features, make things work differently—but don’t publish release notes or call attention to changes, even if it means confusing users who have been used to doing something a certain way for a very long time. I realize Apple is trying to put a veneer of simplicity on their products, but in my opinion, giving users more information is better than making them guess. In fact, it’s not just new features that leave users guessing. Lots of the ways Mail has worked for the past decade have been far from obvious, with explanations in Mail’s built-in help or on Apple’s Web site being either inadequate or absent. Mail is an outstandingly powerful tool, but too many of its capabilities are left undocumented—either you stumble across them or you don’t. Email is crucial to my work and personal life, and my feeling is that I can’t afford to have anything less than a complete grip on the tool I use to manage it. Since Apple didn’t provide the instructions I needed, I spent lots of time figuring out how things worked and wrote my own instruction manual! That’s the book you’re now reading. It explains all the important things I’ve wondered how to do in Mail. I hope you’ll find it both helpful and interesting. 10 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Quick Start to Controlling Apple Mail You can read this book in any order you wish, though I recommend reading the background information listed under “Manage Mail setup” before proceeding with the rest of the book. If you’re familiar with previous editions of this ebook, you may prefer to start with What’s New in This Edition, a few pages earlier. Manage Mail setup: • Start on the right foot as you Learn What’s New in Mountain Lion Mail and Learn about Email Protocols. • Get Mail up and running in Set Up Your Accounts. Read email: • Get mail into your Inbox; then sort it, read it, and work with it. See Read Incoming Messages. Create email: • Make sure your messages reach the right destinations by reading Address Addressing. • Get your message across with style (or even with plain text!). Read Compose and Send Messages. • Send private information safely. Read Sign and Encrypt Messages. Get organized: • Understand and use the organizational tools Mail provides. See Manage Your Mailboxes. • Find any message in a jiffy. See Find Your Messages. • Let Mail sort and file your messages. See Automate Mail with Rules. Make Mail work better: • Having problems sending, receiving, or searching email? Find a solution in Fix Mail Problems. • Make sure you don’t lose your valuable email. Learn how to Back Up and Restore Your Email. 11 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Learn What’s New in Mountain Lion Mail The Mountain Lion version of Mail (6.x) hasn’t changed dramatically from the Lion version, but it does have several important differences: • Easier account enabling/disabling: If you have multiple email accounts, you can now turn individual accounts on or off with fewer steps than previously required. See the sidebar Enable and Disable Accounts. • VIPs: Mail can now identify and draw your attention to messages from the senders you consider most important. See Work with VIPs. • Notifications: Besides optionally playing a sound when a message arrives, Mail can now take advantage of Mountain Lion’s systemwide Notification Center. See Manage Notifications. • Shared pages from Safari: The new Share feature in Safari lets you send Web pages to Mail, where a pop-up menu lets you pick a format. See Attaching Web Pages from Safari. • Archive mailbox: Building on the Archive command added in Lion, Mail in Mountain Lion treats a top-level Archive mailbox as a “special” mailbox, including unifying Archive mailboxes from multiple accounts. See Special Mailboxes. • Inline find: When searching within the text of the current message, Mail now uses an inline interface much like that of Safari. See Search within the Current Message. • No more notes: In Mountain Lion, the new stand-alone Notes app is responsible for displaying and syncing notes, so that capability has been removed from Mail. But don’t worry, your notes are still safe—they’re just in a different location. • No more RSS: The Mountain Lion version of Mail no longer displays RSS feeds, so you’ll have to turn to any of numerous thirdparty RSS readers for this purpose. 12 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Learn about Email Protocols The word “protocol” may sound complicated, but it’s just a way of describing how your email program talks to a mail server. If you know a few basics about email protocols up front, you’ll have an easier time understanding Mail’s interface and solving problems. Although you may not be aware of it, most email accounts involve two separate systems—one for receiving and another for sending— and these often use entirely different servers. You probably use the same username and password for each, but behind the scenes, each account may function as two separate accounts: • Your incoming account fetches email from your mail server and delivers it to you using a mail delivery protocol—such as POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). Just ahead, I explain more about POP and IMAP, and I mention a few important points about iCloud accounts. • Your outgoing account uses a mail transfer protocol called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send email from your machine to your mail server, and then (usually through a number of intermediate steps) to the recipient’s mail server. Microsoft Exchange accounts are a bit different. They act like IMAP accounts in many ways, but use a single—and an entirely different— protocol for receiving and sending mail, as well as calendar items, contacts, and other information. POP A POP account works like this: First, your client (that is, your email program) asks the server for the list of messages in your Inbox. Then, depending on your client’s capabilities and settings, it downloads either all the messages, the messages you select, or all messages under a specified size, to your local device. Finally (and optionally), your client instructs the server to delete its copy of some or all of the messages. The server doesn’t keep track of whether a message has been 13 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Set Up Your Accounts In Mail 6.x, account setup is as easy as it gets. In Mail’s Accounts preference pane, click the plus button at the bottom. Fill in your name, email address, and password, and click Continue. (See the sidebar just ahead for another way to set up accounts.) Mail then attempts to figure out everything else it needs to know, such as your account type (POP, IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange), the names of your incoming and outgoing mail servers, and whether to use SSL. This works surprisingly well for most email providers. If Mail can’t figure out how to set up your account automatically, it does the next best thing, which is to run an assistant that guides you through entering your account details. As long as you have the basic setup information that every email provider supplies to its customers, you should be ready to go in under two minutes. Rather than walk you through every step of this normally selfexplanatory process, I’d like to offer a few account setup tips, beginning with special instructions for Gmail users and continuing with some general Account Setup Tips. Mail, Contacts & Calendars Preference Pane Just as iOS has always had a single “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” category in the Settings app, OS X has a central location where you can set up accounts for email, contact, and calendar services— you guessed it, the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane of System Preferences. This is a logical approach, since many online services (including iCloud, Gmail, and Exchange servers) use a single set of credentials for all three types of data. You can still set up email accounts from within Mail; when you do, they appear in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars preference pane too. The reverse is also true, so feel free to go to either place to set up your email accounts. 19 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Read Incoming Messages No email-related task is more basic than reading messages that other people send you. In this chapter, I get you going with the basics and cover what I consider to be the most essential aspects of reading your email. Later on, I look at advanced topics that relate to reading messages, particularly Manage Your Mailboxes, Find Your Messages, and Automate Mail with Rules. Check Your Email Before you can read your email, you must download it (or a portion of it) into Mail so you can see it. By default, Mail checks your active email accounts automatically when you launch the application and every 5 minutes thereafter. You can also retrieve email manually or change the automatic checking interval: • To check mail manually, click the Get Mail toolbar button. • To change the automatic checking interval, open Mail’s General preference pane and choose a new setting using the Check for New Messages pop-up menu. I recommend the default, Every 5 Minutes, for most people with fast, always-on Internet connections. But if you get mail as often as I do, you might want to turn off the alert sound that plays when new mail arrives to avoid having frequent interruptions. To do this, go to Mail’s General preference pane and choose None from the New Messages Sound pop-up menu. For information on managing other kinds of alerts, see Manage Notifications, later in this chapter. Although you can’t adjust the frequency of checking for an individual account, you can exempt an account from automatic checking. To do this, open Mail’s Accounts preference pane, select the account, and go to the Advanced view. Uncheck the box labeled Include When Automatically Checking for New Messages, close the window, and save your changes when prompted. Mail then retrieves messages from that account only when you check your mail manually or when another action, such as sending mail, triggers an automatic check. 31 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Compose and Send Messages After you open a new message window and address the message (covered just previously in Address Addressing), the rest should be a matter of filling in the text and clicking Send, right? Well, it can be…but you may want to know about some additional topics. Feel free to read these in any order: • “Handle Message Formatting,” below, discusses the use of plain versus formatted text. • Read Personalize Email with Signatures to understand Mail’s Signature feature. • To learn about assigning priority to outgoing messages, see Set Message Priority. • See Work with Outgoing Attachments if you want to send files to other people. • Flip ahead to Reply to Messages for information on special options Mail provides when replying. • Forward Messages as Attachments discusses a special way Mail can forward messages. • Read Use Mail Stationery to learn about Mail’s templates for sending newsletters, announcements, and the like. Handle Message Formatting You can make sure that your messages arrive with the optimal formatting for your recipients by considering whether to use plain text or rich text, and by being aware of a few special formatting tips. Decide on a Message Format When composing a message, you can choose either of two formats: • Plain text: Plain text includes text only, without fonts, styles, or other formatting. Plain text is ideal when readability is paramount. 75 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Sign and Encrypt Messages Back in Personalize Email with Signatures, I explained how to add a signature—text or graphics to the end of each message with your contact information, a quote, or other content. But a message can also have a digital signature, a (normally invisible) string of characters that confirms to the recipient that the message truly comes from the address it appears to come from, and that the message contents haven’t been altered in transit. In addition, Mail can encrypt messages, scrambling their contents so that only someone with the necessary key (presumably, the recipient) can view their contents and thereby ensuring private communications. In this chapter I discuss if and when you should use digital signatures and encryption, how they work behind the scenes, and how to go about signing and encrypting messages in Mail. Learn When and Why to Sign or Encrypt Messages Let me start with the essential question of whether, or under what circumstances, you should even think about signing or encrypting messages. It’s not something everyone needs to do, and if you never need to do it, you need not bother reading the rest of this chapter. But the need could arise at some point—and even if you don’t need to sign or encrypt, you may find that there are some benefits to doing so. Most of us are accustomed to thinking of email as being private. One person sends a message and someone else receives it; as long as no one is looking over either person’s shoulder or snooping on their computers when they’re not around, we presume that whatever was in that message is known only to the sender and recipient. Indeed, that’s how things work most of the time. But then, the same thing is true of paper letters. Most of the time no one except 91 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Manage Your Mailboxes Each account in Mail typically has several mailboxes—basically folders for holding email—including Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and Archive. You can also add your own mailboxes, and you can organize them in various ways. In this chapter, I explain the special mailboxes that Mail stores your email in automatically and I tell you how to Create a New Mailbox and how to Arrange, Hide, and Show Mailboxes. Mailbox Basics Your mailboxes appear in the sidebar, on the left of the main Viewer window. (If the sidebar isn’t visible, choose View > Show Mailbox List or press Command-Shift-M.) If you have more than one account, Mail unifies all mailboxes of a particular type under a single icon in the Mailboxes category in the sidebar. For example, if you have three accounts, Mail displays a single Inbox icon; select this icon to list the incoming messages for all three accounts. If you click the triangle next to the Inbox icon, each account appears individually; click any one of these icons to display the contents of just that account’s Inbox. Special Mailboxes Six mailboxes that appear in most accounts—Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and Archive—have distinctive icons and behave differently from other mailboxes; I refer to these as “special” mailboxes (Figure 24). 103 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Find Your Messages Spotlight automatically indexes all your messages for super-fast searching, and you can search for them either within Mail or using the system-wide Spotlight menu. But Mail isn’t limited to simple text searches. With a flexible system of search tokens (which I explain in a moment), Boolean searches, and other options, you can find almost any message you can describe. Save Your Email Quite often, someone writes to ask me for some information that I sent earlier—each time accompanied by the apology, “Sorry, I know you sent it to me, but I deleted it.” When this happens, I shake my head, sigh, and ask, “But why?” I know many people have the habit of deleting email messages as soon as they’ve read them. I applaud the tidiness such a habit lends to one’s Inbox, and I recognize that in some cases this habit originated because of limited disk space or online mail storage. But look—it’s 2012. With modern tools, ultra-large hard drive sizes, highcapacity email accounts, and fast Spotlight searching, you can afford to break this habit. Of course, you should feel free to delete spam and other messages you know for certain you’ll never need, but when in doubt, I suggest saving your messages. Perform a Basic Search To find an email message, begin by (optionally) selecting one or more mailboxes in the sidebar in which you want to search. Then start typing in the Search field in Mail’s toolbar. (To jump right to the Search field, press Command-Option-F.) Mail begins displaying results in the message list immediately—sometimes even before you finish typing. To hide the results and return to the message list, click the icon in the Search box. Note: Searches in Mail are insensitive to case and encompass accented characters. For example, searching for ipad will match iPad, and searching for creme brulee will match Crème Brûlée. 109 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Automate Mail with Rules Mail applies rules (sometimes called filters) automatically to incoming messages. Among other things, rules can highlight messages or move them to specific mailboxes based on criteria like the name of the sender or the nature of the message content. For example, you can sort messages from mailing lists into a mailbox you check only when you have time, while highlighting messages from your boss in a special color. Because they are so powerful, rules are one of my favorite Mail features. This chapter includes a quick primer on creating rules, along with a few examples and tips. Create a Rule To create a basic rule, follow these steps: 1. Go to the Rules preference pane and click Add Rule. A dialog appears showing the condition(s) the rule checks for and the action(s) Mail takes if the conditions match. 2. Enter a name for the rule in the Description field. 3. Set a condition to check for: Start by choosing something from the left-hand pop-up menu in this area; depending on what you choose, you may now see a second pop-up menu, a text field, or both. Here are some examples of a completed condition: [From] [Contains] apple.com [Subject] [Begins with] Take Control [Date Sent] [Is Less Than] 3 days old [Message Content] [Does not contain] Lion 4. From the provided pop-up menus, choose the action you want the rule to perform on a message if (and only if) it matches the condition you just specified. (Just ahead I explain how to handle rules that include multiple actions.) 119 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Fix Mail Problems As much as I love Mail, it does have its share of problems. Although a complete troubleshooting guide to Mail could run hundreds of pages, I’ve compiled solutions to some of the most common (and egregious) problems in the pages ahead, including difficulties receiving and sending mail, problems with damaged mailboxes, and misbehaving Spotlight searches. Fix Incoming Mail Problems If Mail cannot download incoming messages, the cause may be anything from an incorrect setting in Mail, to a server problem, to a loss of Internet connectivity. Work through each of the following sections until you resolve the problem. Tip: To check on what Mail is doing behind the scenes, choose Window > Activity Viewer. A small floating window appears, displaying detail about each activity Mail is performing. To cancel any task, click the red “Stop” button next to it. Try Connection Doctor To open Connection Doctor, choose Window > Connection Doctor. In the Connection Doctor window, Mail lists every incoming and outgoing email account you’ve configured—even those you’ve temporarily disabled. It attempts to log in to each account, and if it fails with any of them, it shows an explanation of why it failed. These explanations aren’t always helpful, but they often give you a good starting point in debugging problems, and are written in refreshingly plain English. If the Connection Doctor window suggests a specific fix, try that first. Otherwise, proceed with the following steps. Username and Password Errors If you enter your password in Mail’s Accounts preference pane, Mail stores the password in your keychain (which is usually what you want). If, for security reasons, you prefer for Mail to prompt you for your password each time you connect, leave the Password field blank. 125 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Back Up and Restore Your Email A number of years ago, my computer suffered a severe hard drive crash that wiped out years of saved email. At that time, I had not yet switched to IMAP, and I backed up perhaps once a year, so most of those messages were unrecoverable. The loss was devastating, but the shame was worse: I knew better than to put all my data in one basket, but I had done it anyway. I learned a valuable lesson, and today I back up my email (along with the rest of my files) religiously. If you back up your email properly, you can recover from nearly any disaster; if you don’t, your chances are slim. So please get in the habit of backing up your email regularly. In this chapter, I discuss several methods of backing up (and restoring) email. I suggest that you read—or at least skim—the entire chapter to identify the best methods for you. Back Up and Restore with Time Machine Time Machine is one of the easiest ways to back up and restore all your data—including email. After attaching an external hard drive, you can turn on Time Machine (and, if necessary, select which volume to use and whether to exclude any files) in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences. With Time Machine running, your data is automatically backed up every hour, and you can go back to see how your Inbox (or another mailbox) looked at many points in the past. To restore messages or notes in Mail that Time Machine previously backed up: 1. Navigate to any view in which the item you’re looking for should appear—say, your Inbox or another mailbox. Not so smart: Time Machine doesn’t let you select smart mailboxes. 138 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! About This Book Thank you for purchasing this Take Control book. We hope you find it both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments at tc-comments@tidbits.com. Ebook Extras You can access extras related to this ebook on the Web. Once you’re on the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy a subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and—usually— Mobipocket. (Learn about reading this ebook on handheld devices at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/device-advice.) • Read postings to the ebook’s blog. These may include new information and tips, as well as links to author interviews. At the top of the blog, you can also see any update plans for the ebook. If you bought this ebook from the Take Control Web site, it has been automatically added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually: • If you already have a Take Control account, log in to your account, and then click the “access extras…” link above. • If you don’t have a Take Control account, first make one by following the directions that appear when you click the “access extras…” link above. Then, once you are logged in to your new account, add your ebook by clicking the “access extras…” link a second time. Note: If you try the directions above and find that the device you’re reading on is incompatible with the Take Control Web site, contact us at tc-comments@tidbits.com. 142 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! About the Author Joe Kissell is Senior Editor of TidBITS, a Web site and email newsletter about Apple and the Internet, and the author of numerous books about Macintosh software, including Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac and Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac. He is also a Senior Contributor to Macworld, was the winner of a 2009 Neal award for Best How-to Article, and has appeared on the MacTech 25 list (the 25 people voted most influential in the Macintosh community) since 2007. Joe has worked in the Mac software industry since the early 1990s, including positions managing software development for Nisus Software and Kensington Technology Group. When not writing or speaking, Joe likes to travel, walk, cook, eat, and dream (in both senses of the word). He currently lives in Paris with his wife, Morgen Jahnke, their son, Soren, and their cat, Zora. To contact Joe about this book, send him email at jwk@me.com and include Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion in the subject of your message so his spam filters won’t intercept it. Shameless Plug Although I write and speak about technology as my day job, I have a great many other interests. To learn more about me, read other things I’ve written, and find out what I’m up to beyond the realm of Apple products, visit my home page at JoeKissell.com. You can also follow me on Twitter (@joekissell). 143 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! About the Publisher Publishers Adam and Tonya Engst have been creating Apple-related content since they started the online newsletter TidBITS, in 1990. In TidBITS, you can find the latest Apple news, plus read reviews, opinions, and more (http://tidbits.com/). Adam and Tonya are known in the Apple world as writers, editors, and speakers. They are also parents to Tristan, who thinks ebooks about clipper ships and castles would be cool. Production credits: • Cover design: Jon Hersh • Editor: Michael E. Cohen • Editor in Chief: Tonya Engst • Production Assistants: Michael E. Cohen, Oliver Habicht • Publisher: Adam Engst • Take Control logo: Jeff Tolbert 144 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Copyright and Fine Print Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion ISBN: 978-1-61542-408-5 Copyright © 2012, Joe Kissell. All rights reserved. TidBITS Publishing Inc. 50 Hickory Road Ithaca, NY 14850 USA http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/ Take Control electronic books help readers regain a measure of control in an oftentimes out-of-control universe. Take Control ebooks also streamline the publication process so that information about quickly changing technical topics can be published while it’s still relevant and accurate. This electronic book doesn’t use copy protection because copy protection makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of this ebook with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, he or she should buy a copy. Your support makes it possible for future Take Control ebooks to hit the Internet long before you’d find the same information in a printed book. Plus, if you buy the ebook, you’re entitled to any free updates that become available. You have our permission to make a single print copy of this ebook for personal use. Please reference this page if a print service refuses to print the ebook for copyright reasons. Although the author and TidBITS Publishing Inc. have made a reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this ebook is distributed “As Is,” without warranty of any kind. Neither TidBITS Publishing Inc. nor the author shall be liable to any person or entity for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation lost revenues or lost profits, that may result (or that are alleged to result) from the use of these materials. In other words, use this information at your own risk. Many of the designations used to distinguish products and services are claimed as trademarks or service marks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features that appear in this title are assumed to be the property of their respective owners. All product names and services are used in an editorial fashion only, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is meant to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this title. This title is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Because of the nature of this title, it uses terms that are the trademarks or that are the registered trademarks of Apple Inc.; to view a complete list of the trademarks and of the registered trademarks of Apple Inc., you can visit http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html. 145 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15! Featured Titles Click any book title below or visit our Web catalog to add more ebooks to your Take Control collection! Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac (Joe Kissell): Set up a rocksolid backup strategy so that you can restore quickly and completely, no matter what catastrophe arises. Take Control of CrashPlan Backups (Joe Kissell): Join backup expert Joe Kissell as he shares real-world advice about protecting your data with CrashPlan’s onsite, offsite, and cloud backups. Take Control of iCloud (Joe Kissell): Understand the many features, get set up properly, and enjoy iCloud! Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2 (Joe Kissell): Store, organize, and locate your PDFs, paper documents, email messages, and scribbled notes with DEVONthink 2. Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ (Kirk McElhearn): This FAQ-style ebook helps you wrap iTunes around your little finger and enjoy your media more. Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch (Joe Kissell): Develop your mobile email strategy and learn how to use email effectively on your iDevice. Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand ’11 (Jeff Tolbert): Combine your creativity with GarageBand’s editing and mixing techniques to compose tunes that please the ear! Take Control of TextExpander (Michael E. Cohen): Whether you want to type faster or you already use TextExpander but want to harness its power more fully, let Michael lead you to typing nirvana. Take Control of Using Mountain Lion (Matt Neuburg): Chockablock with core concepts and insider tips on customizing and navigating in 10.8 Mountain Lion. Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network (Glenn Fleishman): Make your AirPort network fly—get help with buying the best gear, set up, security, and more. 146 Click here to buy the full 146-page “Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion” for only $15!
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