Email Using Apple Mail
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As with browsers there are many applications for checking your email, but I will concentrate on the two most popular, Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Entourage. Any other email clients like Thunderbird or Eudora do basically the same thing even if they look slightly different. Configuration is the same too.
Before we start we need to get clear that we are talking about email that is downloaded into an email application, called POP email rather than browser email like Hotmail or Yahoo that you view via a browser window in Firefox or Safari. POP is a far superior way to deal with email because the messages and their related attachments are locally on your computer rather than being stored on the Hotmail server out there on the web. You can read them whether you have an internet connection or not and attachments can be filed away if required.
Browser email means that each message has to be accessed individually which takes time. Since Gmail came along browser email has had a revolution. Now you get the best of both worlds: the flexibility of browser email is that you can access it from any computer in the world, all you need is your user name and password with the emails also being downloaded onto your computer if you are on it. Companies like Yahoo used to charge a premium if you wanted to download your email using POP email but as Gmail offers this for free their business model is defunct. With a Gmail account — or several — you can do both. It also has a built-in 'vacation responder' so you can have a message sent to all incoming emails if you are away on holiday. You can also retrieve email from any other account like Hotmail or any POP email into your Gmail account so these advantages can be applied to any of your previous accounts. I heartily recommend using Gmail as your main email for these reasons.
So either we are configuring Apple Mail for a POP account or for a Gmail account, we'll begin with the former. If you open Apple Mail it will lead you through an assistant asking for the various settings which you get from your ISP (Internet Service Provider). The User Name and it's Password are the main things you will need along with the Mail Server settings. If you are setting up a Gmail account it is an automatic process, which we'll come to later.
Open Mail to get the first window:
Here you are asked for the first bit of information, your Email Address and the Password that goes with it. In the Full Name box you enter whatever you want to appear on emails you have sent. It has no bearing on how the email works and you can enter anything.
Your User name is the email address up until the @ symbol and in a few unusual cases such as with Optus accounts it is the whole email address. Click Continue to get the next window:
The Mail Server is the computer out there on the internet that stores your email until you collect it. Usually it is mail.yourisp.com.au but sometimes it is something else. Get this info from your ISP or try mail.yourisp.com.au or whatever it's domain name is. Next window should look like this:
Make sure that it is as in this pic unless you have information to the contrary from your ISP. Continue next window, the Outgoing Mail Server, which is usually the same as the Incoming Mail Server and is the same as your ISP that is providing your internet service:
Continue to Outgoing Mail Security which doesn't have any! Again, unless your ISP tells you differently:
Continue to get the Account Summary Page:
Click the Create button having made sure that the Take account online button is ticked and Mail will open it's basic window and go off and get your emails, it has 2 in the Inbox on the left:
If all the settings were correct some emails will come in, at the very least from your ISP welcoming you to the company. Email summaries appear in the upper pane of the window with the body of the email in the lower. As you click through the emails they appear for you to read.
To Reply to an email: with the email selected click the Reply button above the emails and a new window will open with the text from the email sent to you and the cursor waiting for you to type a reply:
Type your missive, hit the Send button and of it goes. To start a new message click the New Message button to get the window:
You will see the address box, called To: which is where you enter the email address of the person you want to send a message to. This is case sensitive and must be exactly correct with no spaces. If you have entries in your Address Book then enter the first letter of the name and it will appear along with any others with the same letter. Choose the one you want. This saves typing the entire address each time.
In this window you can click the Photo Browser button to access images from the iPhoto application if you have photos you want to include in the email:
Locate the image from the panel on the right and drag it into the email. Repeat as required.
If you want to use Stationery which gives the email a style, click the Stationery button and choose from a style. Change the text to your own entry and the picture to one of yours:
The last thing to look at in Mail is the Preferences. These are found in all applications under the Application's own menu. Look under the Mail menu and open Preferences:
For example if you are on a website in Safari and the site wants you to send it an email, when you click to send it whatever is set here will open. So leave it on Mail. The rest of this page you can leave alone unless you see anything to alter.
Moving to the next pane which is a summary of your account details and is also where you can add another account:
To add another account click the little - button on the bottom left and enter the details as we did earlier in setting up the initial account. This time I have aded a Gmail account which has slightly different settings.
Moving along to the Junk tab (and ignoring RSS for now) we get more choices:
You have the main choice of leaving Junk mail in your Inbox or having it moved to a special Junk mailbox, which is my preferred choice. If you do this you must check it regularly because messages will end up in it that aren't actually Junk so you need to locate them and tell Mail that they aren't Junk by clicking the Not Junk button!
Its worth mentioning at this stage that you should always add anyone real to your Address Book so their messages don't get flagged as junk...
The next pane lets you choose what Fonts you prefer:
Ignore the next two panes and go straight to Signatures:
Signatures are very handy time saving features that let you add some pre-created text and images to an email, automatically or manually. Typically you would have your phone numbers and maybe address on a signature, or a little special saying, or an image. Whatever you like really.
Select your account on the left and click the + button to add a Signature. Enter anything you like including dragging an image into the signature pane, give it a name and you're done. Here you can also set it to be added automatically to your email. Once you have a lot of signatures, one for each occasion, you can add them manually from inside the email message window.
Close the Preferences window and that's done.
Mail also has Notes and To Do's. These can synch to your iPhone if you have one. Click the Notes icon to get the new Note window, enter whatever you want to remember and close when done. A Note will appear with the first few words of the note in the left hand side of Mail under Reminders, there you will see your Notes and To Do's:
With the Notes icon selected on the left of Mail, click the To Do icon and it's window will appear:
Give it a name, a date and whether you want an alarm to remind you of it! You can choose from a message, an alarm with or without sound, or an email.
Notes, To Do's and emails are deleted in the same way: select the item and hit the Delete key on the keyboard.
That's the basics of Mail although there are more features we haven't looked at here...
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