Joshua Zimmerman

In this guide, I'll show you how to use some of the cool features that make Mail fun to use. These include things such as how to set up junk filters, organize by threads, and customizing your tool bar. These tools will help you be more organized and more productive than you probably were before. If not that, they should save you some time and effort and at least keep you well organized for the most part. You may never use some of these tools, but its good to know that they are there if you ever do. This guide is for Mail in 10.3, so earlier version many not have all these option, though most should still be the same.

Mail Set-up

If you're reading this and have not already set up Mail to get your campus e-mail, than you should go read the Mail Set-Up guide. Setting up Mail is rather easy, so don't panic. It'll take you five minutes at the most, and once you're done, return here.

Customize That Toolbar

Your Toolbar is that nice row of icons along the top of your Mail window. By default you should have Delete, Replay, Replay All, Forward, New, Mailboxes, Get Mail, and a search field. These are all fine and dandy, but there are other options you may wish to use every day that are not up there. Adding them is quite simple.

First you need to have Mail open. Now go to the View pulldown menue, and than down to Customize Toolbar. When you do this a nice big window should slide down in front of your mail Mail window, showing you a large number of icons.

(Here are a few of the items it should show you)

Now to add an option to your Toolbar all you do it click and drag it into your Toolbar. You can get rid of it, or the defaults even, by clicking and draging them out of your Toolbar. Heres a quick example of a new Toolbar.

Now say for some reason you really mess up your Toolbar you can return it to the default setting by dragging the Default Set from the bottom of the list of icons up to your Toolbar. If you don't like icons, you can have your Toolbar show text only by using the Show option at the bottom of the icon listing. The same goes for the text, you can show just icons.

All these options can be found elsewhere in Mail. Mostly somewhere in the pulldown menues. Changeing your Toolbar is just for convience. There are several items that are not to obvious, but can be very handy, that I think I'll run through.

Bounce to Sender: This option allows you to sent a reply e-mail to someone that appears to be a 'User Does Not Exhist' e-mail. If you've ever sent an e-mail to an address that no longer exhists you get a message back that is filled with a bunch of nonsense. Thats what this does. This is very handy if you're getting spam from someplace (you can sometimes fool the spam sender into thinking you're not real), forwards from annoying friends, or e-mails from a stalker.

Add To Address Book: This adds the sender of an e-mail to your Address Book, filling in a bunch of information for you. This is handy for when you're first gathering contacts into your Address Book, or if you often add people in general.

Threads: This turns the option of Threads on and off at will. This is a very handy feature of which I will talk about in great detail later.

Junk: This gives you the ability to tell Mail that an e-mail is spam. This allows Mail to learn and better filter spam for you. I'll talk about spam filtering later on.

A last note about Toolbars. Most every OS X program allows you to customize its toolbar, including OS X. You can customize a new mail window, for instance. Play around with it when you have some time. They usually save you some hastle and can show you hidden options.

Junk Mail Filtering

Mail has some really nice spam filters, and will learn from you if set it up right. This can come in very handy for some of us who get 20-30 spam message a day. But before we go into the filtering software let me share with you a couple of anti-spam tips.

1) Get a second e-mail account. Use this second account for webpages that require an e-mail address, or for buying stuff online. Use your college account for personal e-mail and for school. Websites often sell e-mail address to spammers, and thats how your address gets out.

2) Don't post your e-mail addrss online. If you're in a forum or makign a webpage, don't put your personal address up so everyone can see it. Spammers use programs called 'bots' and 'spiders' to scan webpages and gather e-mail addresses.

3) Be careful who you give your address to. If you're getting bad mail from someone, use the Bounce to Sender option in Mail.

Now for the junk. Go to the Mail pulldown menue and than down to Preferences. Chose the Junk Mail option. You should see this window with these options.

First off you want to enable filtering. If you than chose to Move it to the Junk mailbox, it will move spam (or what it thinks is spam) to a special mailbox for you. This is the best option for those of us who get lots of spam, but be sure to check the mailbox now and than to see if theres any legitimate mail in there. Leave it in my Inbox will leave spam in your Inbox but will color it green. If for some reason mail does not identify something as spam, you can go to use the Toolbar option Junk to label it as such. Now the other options you should probably have all checked. This just lets Mail know that messages from people in your Address Book are not spam, and Mail will never count them as spam. If you've got a lot of time, you can play with the Advanced features of Junk. Maybe for those of you who have a lot of it.

That should help your spam problem. I usualy don't use the spam filtering because I don't get any spam, but these tips should help out those of you who do.

Threads

The option to turn on Threads is something completely new to 10.3. When you turn this option on it tells Mail that it should organize a serries of replays together into set. Such as if you're mailing lots of replys back and forth, instead of them being spread all over they all stick together. Its easier shown than explained.

Here is what a Thread looks like unexpanded.

Heres what happens when you hit the little arrow to the left, and it expands.

I simpily LOVE this new option. I can see what everyone has written to me on a certain subject, and if I've replied or not. To enable this feature you can add a Toolbar option, or just go to the pulldown menue View and down to Organize by Thread. The other two options there will expand all your threads, or will collapse all of them. I highly reccomend that you give this option a try, you'll fall in love with it right away.

Signatures

Many times people have fun little quotes or personal information at the end of their e-mails. These are called Signatures and can be automated using Mail. To do this go to the pulldown menue Mail and than down to Preferences.

You should see something like this

Once here just click on the Add Signature button and add something. You can have a whole score of Signatures and have them put in randomly, or in order. To do this click on the Automatically Insert Signature option and chose what works best for you.

That should do it for you. Have fun making up funny comments or just making a standard one with your name and homepage or something.

Rules

Some people love Mail just for the Rules feature. This feature allows you to setup individual rules for people or groups. Such as if you'd like all messages form your mom and dad's e-mail address to be highlighted in red, or if you'd like all messages from a certain class (or all yoru classes) to go into a certain folder. All this is done automaticly, once you set up the proper Rules.

Go to the pulldown menue Mail and down to Preferences. There should be a tab callled Rules on the far right. You should see a list of current Rules, most likely ones that were premade for you. You can trash them, or use them as an example. Let run you through making a custom one just for our GACMug mailing list.

Click on the button Add Rule. You should need see this screen.

In the Description field, call it GACMug. Make sure the If line is set to Any, than next make it look like I have it above. Under the Proform the following actions: line make the first part be Set Color of Message and than the next part to to text and the last area make it what ever color you want it to be. Than click on the ok button. Now whenever you get an e-mail from the GACMug mailing list it'll be a special color.

Thats how you set up a rule. You can set it up for a whole host of conditions and make it do a ton of things. Just check out all the different conditions it will do. If you're really picky you can set up multipul conditions for e-mails by clicking on the little + button to the right of the conditions. If you spend a little time on settign up Rules you can make all your e-mails highly organized.

So those were some of the cool Mail features that you can use. Try them out, and they'll probably save you some time, or save you from SPAM! Damn the SPAM.

-Joshua