OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Reading Email

Mail puts all incoming email into your Inbox; the statistic after the word Inbox lets you know how many messages you haven’t yet read. New messages are also marked with light-blue dots in the main list.

Tip

The Mail icon in the Dock also shows you how many new messages you have waiting; it’s the number in the red circle. In Mail→Preferences→General, you can specify which mailbox it’s tallying up—or have it tally up all of them.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Favorites Bar Keyboard Shortcuts

One of the best parts of the Favorites bar is that you have complete keyboard control over the buttons there. The keystrokes ⌘-1 through ⌘-9 “click” the first nine buttons on the Favorites bar. Press ⌘-1, for example, to see what’s in the first mailbox you’ve installed on the Favorites bar.

Even cooler yet, if you add the Control key, you now know the keyboard shortcuts for moving selected messages to those corresponding folders. For example, you can highlight a message and then press ⌘-Control-3, confident that you’ve just filed that message away into your third Favorites-bar folder.

That is, you can now file messages using only the keyboard—and when you’re in the thick of things, the less time you spend using the mouse, the better.

Click the Inbox folder to see a list of received messages. If it’s a long list, press Control-Page Up and Control-Page Down to scroll. (Page Up and Page Down without the Control key scroll the message pane instead.)

Tip

If you ⌘-click more than one mailbox folder, you can ...