OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Managing E-Mail Accounts and Mailboxes

With your e-mail accounts set up, you're ready to send and receive e-mail messages. But first take a few more minutes to understand how to manage your e-mail accounts and the mailboxes that contain the messages so you don't get overwhelmed with the huge number of messages that are sure to collect in Mail. If you have multiple e-mail accounts set up in Mail, knowing how to manage those accounts is even more crucial to keep everything straight.

Some management controls reside in the Mail Preferences dialog box, those over which accounts are active (the Accounts pane), what accounts messages are sent from by default (the Composing pane), which signature is associated to each account (the Signatures pane), and how messages are filtered (the Rules pane). Refer to the details on those sections in the “Setting Mail's preferences” section in this chapter.

The rest of the account management, as well as your mailbox management, happens in the Message Viewer, which Figures 18.7 and 18.8 show. Figure 18.7 shows the new layout introduced in OS X Lion, and Figure 18.8 shows the “classic” view used in previous versions and still available in OS X Mountain Lion. In the Sidebar is a list of the active e-mail accounts, with the status of each indicated through a series of icons.

Note

Apple's Mail uses the terms account and mailbox. Technically, a mailbox is a folder for messages. An account is a set of connection settings for an e-mail address and the messages ...