OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual

Tailoring the Look of Mail

Apple put a lot of energy into exploiting the size and shape of your screen. In a program made for managing lists and reading messages, you need all the room you can get.

You’ve always been able to tweak Mail’s look, layout, and proportions—but now you have both the modern layout (three columns) and the Classic layout (list above, message below), which is still around. The following pages offer advice in modifying the design of both layouts.

Tweaking the Three-Column Layout

The three-column view is shown in Figure 18-3 at top. Here’s some of the plastic surgery you can perform:

• Try Full Screen mode. Click the in the upper-right corner to make the Mail window expand to fill your monitor. (See Icon-View Options for details on Full Screen mode.) Full Screen mode is a natural for space-hungry email, especially on a small laptop screen.

  

  Figure 18-3. Mail can have several different layouts. In the standard three-column view (top), all your mailboxes are grouped tidily in the far-left column. You can hide that column, though, so that you have more space for reading (middle). You can also return to the pre-Lion layout (bottom), in which the messages list is above the message body.

  Note

  In Full Screen mode, any individual message or note that you double-click pops front ...