Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

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 can choose either the modern layout (three columns) and the Classic layout (list above, message below). The following pages offer advice for modifying the design of both layouts.

Tweaking the Three-Column Layout

The three-column view is shown in Figure 11-2 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 Mode for details on Full Screen mode.) Full Screen mode is a natural for space-hungry email, especially on a small laptop screen.

• Install folders onto the Favorites bar. You can drag any icon in the mailboxes list onto the Favorites toolbar, where it becomes a button or a pop-up menu. The button works exactly like a folder: For example, you can drag a message onto one to file it there, or you can click one of these folder buttons (or use its pop-up menu) to see what’s inside.

  

  Figure 11-2. 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 ...