Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Reading Email

Mail puts all the email you get into your Inbox; the statistic in parentheses after the word Inbox lets you know how many of its messages you haven’t yet read. New messages are also denoted by colorful, liquidy dots in the main list.

Note

The Mail icon in the Dock also shows you how many new messages you have waiting—it’s the number in the red circle, as shown in Figure 19-7.

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. Click the name of a message once to read it in the Preview pane, or double-click a message to open it into a separate window.

Note

Instead of reading your mail, you might prefer to have Mac OS X read it to you, as you sit back in your chair and sip your strawberry daiquiri. Just Control-click inside the Preview pane and choose Speech→Start Speaking from the contextual menu. You’ll hear the message read aloud, in the voice you’ve selected on the Speech pane of System Preferences (Chapter 8).

To stop the insanity, choose Speech→Stop Speaking from the same contextual menu.

Once you’ve viewed a message, you can respond to it, delete it, print it, file it, and so on. The following pages should get you started.

All the Little Symbols

The first column of the main email list shows little symbols that let you know at a glance how you’ve processed certain messages. The most common one is, of course, the gelatinous blue dot (

), which means “new message.” (After reading a message, ...