OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Mail & Contacts

Email is a fast, cheap, convenient communication medium. In fact, these days, anyone who doesn’t have an email address is considered some kind of freak.

If you do have an email address or two, you’ll be happy to discover that OS X includes Mail, a program that lets you get and send email messages without having to wade through a lot of spam (junk mail). Mail is a surprisingly complete program, filled with shortcuts and surprises around every turn, and its Mountain Lion overhaul introduces a couple of clever and useful new features.

Setting Up Mail

Mail can’t get your mail unless it knows the details of your email account. The first time you open Mail, then, it asks you for your name, email address, and email account password. If you use a common email service like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft Exchange, or a common Internet provider like Verizon or Comcast, then you’re in luck; Apple has rounded up the acronym-laden server settings for 30 popular mail services and taught Mail to fill them in for you.

All you have to do is type your email name and password into the box (Figure 18-1). If Mail recognizes the suffix (for example, @gmail.com), and if “Automatically set up account” is turned on, then Mail does the heavy lifting for you. Mail is ready to go online.

Note

You can perform exactly the same account setup in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane in System Preferences. There’s no advantage of one method or the other, except that the System Preferences pane ...