MacTricksAndTips.com

Years ago if you had an email account and you want to download it to your computer, you would use POP to download you email to your Mac. This was all well and good, but then people decided to have more than one device, such as phones, tablets and other computers and wanted to have their email on said device. This presented a problem since POP was a download service, it meant that each device would have one copy of the email and they couldn’t talk to each other. The method of IMAP was developed and has steadily become more popular. This method allows you to manage your email on every device, and each device will update based on the changes made. Every device will have the same email copy. This post is going to tell you how to change your POP based email to IMAP on Mail. Although you could do this with any email client.

I use Mail a lot, as a result I like to customise it to work the way I want to. Today’s tip will show you how to customise the fields in the new message window. Although the images shown are the Snow Leopard version of Mail, I assume there is a similar method available in Lion. The tip will allow you to change the BCC and CC fields as well as a couple of other fields when you compose a new message.

This is just a quick but useful tip I have come across over the last couple of days. In a nutshell when you view emails in Mail, you get the latest one first, followed by the second and so on, the order depends on how you have set them out. This is fine most of the time, but if you are tracking an email conversation it may become difficult to follow. This is where thread view comes into play.

Today’s post idea was originally submitted by Chris, its a rather cool trick he accidentally found when adding new mailboxes into Mail. If you ever use folders it can be a bit of a pain to add sub-folders. This trick will do both, at the same time. Rather cool if you ask me. This trick may also work in other applications, I have yet to try it out.

I send a lot of emails. Most of the time I am in Mail reading and responding to emails. Each email I send will have a signature saying thanks and my name, plus my website if needed. This saves me a lot of time and enables my emails to look a bit more professional. Randomly, I found a nifty little trick in which you can have a different signature each time you compose a new mail message. If you want to add a bit of laughter to your emails, this is the perfect place to put a random quote.

This is another quick Mail tip that I have found to be more useful as I use it. Like most applications you can view extra columns of information in your Mail boxes. For example size, number, attachments. This can be useful for locating emails in the massive pile, sometime Spotlight wont cut it. For example I used this trick to find a specific email. I knew the email had a specific title and an attachment, I search for the title and then sorted by attachment numbers and the email was found. Simple and easy.

Sorry for the Mail centric posts this week. I have a couple of Mail tips and tricks I would like to bash out before I move onto other topics. If you remember the other day I mentioned about controlling your computer with Twitter. This uses an RSS feed to update and run commands. The problem with this is that the RSS default in Mail will only run every 30 minutes. This post will hopefully increase the polling time. I have ran both of the commands shown in this post and the second one does seem to work, although most of my feeds are a little slow to update anyway.

If you have a full inbox like myself it can be very easy to lose track of conversations. You are emailing people back and forth and you have no idea what email belongs to which conversation, it is even worst of people don’t quote what you have been sent. There is a rather simple option called “Organize By Thread” which will organise your inbox via threads. Its not a well known option so I would like to point it out.