Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition

Reading Email

Mail puts all incoming email into your inbox; the statistic after the word “Inbox” lets you know how many messages you haven’t yet read. New messages are also marked with light-blue dots in the main list.

Tip

The Mail icon in the Dock also shows you how many new messages you have waiting; it’s the number in the red circle. In Mail→Preferences→General, you can specify which mailbox it’s tallying up—or have it tally up all of them.

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. (Page Up and Page Down without the Control key scroll the message pane instead.)

Tip

If you ⌘-click more than one mailbox folder, you can combine them (and their total-message counts) into one unified messages list.

Figure 11-6. Top: The little blue Hide button pares down all this gunk to a simpler look—sender, subject, date. (Click Details to expand the header again.) Bottom: If you point to the header without clicking, you get to see the ghosts of four useful buttons: Trash, Reply, Reply All, and Forward.

Click the name of a message once to read it in the message window, or double-click a message to open it into a separate window. (If a message is already selected, pressing Return also opens its separate window.)

When you click the name of a message in the messages list (or press the and keys to highlight successive ...