OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Checking Your Mail

You get new mail and send mail you’ve already written using the Get Mail command. You can trigger it in any of several ways:

• Click the button on the toolbar.

• Choose Mailbox→Get All New Mail (or press Shift-⌘-N).

  Note

  If you have multiple email accounts, you can also use the Mailbox→Get New Mail submenu to pick just one account to check for new mail.

• Right-click (or two-finger click) Mail’s Dock icon and choose Get New Mail from the shortcut menu. (You can use this method from within any program, as long as Mail is already open.)

  UP TO SPEED: POP, IMAP, Exchange, and Web-Based Mail

  When it comes to email, there are four primary flavors of servers (Internet computers that process email): POP (also known as POP3), IMAP (also known as IMAP4), Exchange, and web-based. Each has its own distinct taste, with different strengths and weaknesses.

  POP accounts (Post Office Protocol) are very common. Your Mac downloads your incoming mail from a POP server to your hard drive before you read it, which works fine as long as you’re using only one computer for email.

  The problem with POP, of course, is that things get complicated when you have more than one machine—a phone and a Mac, for example, or a laptop and a desktop. For example, if you usually use a desktop Mac, but you want to take your email along on the road on your laptop, you have to copy the Mail folder from your Home→Library ...