Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Writing Messages

To send an email, click the New toolbar button. The New Message form, shown in Figure 19-4, opens. Here’s how you go about writing a message:

1. Type the email address of the recipient in the “To:” field.

   If somebody is in your address book ( Section 19.6), just type the first couple letters of the name; Mail automatically completes the address. (If the first guess is wrong, just type another letter or two until Mail revises its guess.)

   As in most dialog boxes, you can jump from blank to blank (from the “To:” field to the CC field, for example) by pressing the Tab key.

   If you want to send this message to more than one person, separate their addresses with commas:[e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail].

   POWER USERS’ CLINICThe Mighty Morphing Interface

   You don’t have to be content with the factory-installed design of the Mail screen; you can control almost every aspect of its look and layout.

   For example, you can control the main window’s information columns exactly as you would in a Finder list view window—make a column narrower or wider by dragging the right edge of its column heading, rearrange the columns by dragging their titles, and so on. You can also control which columns appear using the commands in the View→Columns menu. Similarly, you can sort your email by clicking these column headings, exactly as in the Finder (click a second time to reverse the sorting).

   The various panels of the main window are also under your control. For example, you can ...