Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Mail & Address Book

Email is a fast, cheap, convenient communication medium. In fact, these days, anyone who doesn’t have an email address is considered some kind of freak.

If you do have an email address or two, you’ll be happy to discover that Mac OS X includes Mail, a program that lets you get and send email messages without having to wade through a lot of spam (junk mail). Mail is a surprisingly complete program, substantially speeded up for Mac OS 10.6, and it’s filled with shortcuts and surprises around every turn.

And this desktop post office offers more than just mail—among other things, you can also use the program as a personal notepad and a newsreader for your favorite Web sites.

Not bad for a freebie, eh?

Setting Up Mail

What you see the first time you open Mail may vary. If you’ve signed up for a MobileMe account (and typed its name into the MobileMe pane of System Preferences), then you’re all ready to go; you see the main Mail window full of messages. If you don’t get the offer to set up an account, choose File→Add Account to jump-start the process. (That’s also how you add other accounts later.)

If you get your mail from some other service provider, like Verizon, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, or whatever, Mail setup is almost as easy. Apple has rounded up the acronym-laden server settings for 30 popular mail services and built them right in.

All you have to do is type your email name and password into the box (Figure 19-1). If Mail recognizes the suffix (for example, ...