OS X Yosemite: 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 green dot in the upper-left corner to make the Mail window expand to fill your monitor. (See Full Screen Button for details on Full Screen mode.) Full Screen mode is a natural for space-hungry email, especially on a small laptop screen.

  Note

  In Full Screen mode, any individual message that you double-click pops front and center; the rest of the screen, including all your lists and panes and other messages, fades and becomes inactive. While that special effect certainly draws your attention to the one open message, it also means that you can’t copy and paste from another message, refer to another message, or drag to or from another message.

  If you want to do something like that, you have to exit Full Screen mode first.

• Install folders onto the Favorites bar ...