Make more of Mail with Markup

The two big new features in Mail are Mail Drop and Markup. Mail Drop allows you to send attachments up to 5GB in size by uploading them to iCloud Drive, then sending the email with special link in it. The recipient can then click the link to download the file. It’s not a huge improvement on using, say, Dropbox to accomplish the same task, but it does remove a couple of steps from the process. You will, of course, need to have enough spare capacity in your iCloud storage plan to host the file.

The other big new feature is Markup. It’s an extension that allows you to annotate image and PDF attachments from within Mail. This means team members can send attachments back and forth, adding annotations, without leaving Mail.

To use it, click on an attachment to preview it and then click on the icon at the top-left of the window to bring up a toolbar. If you’ve ever annotated images or PDFs in Preview, you’ll have an idea what to expect here – the tools are very similar. Yes, it’s basic and feels like an app within an app, but without the ability to, say, press ç+Z to undo.

While it looks great in the demonstrations, Markup is not the kind of feature we imagine many people will use. It is, however, a great way to demonstrate extensions, third party add-ons that add functionality to OS X. Specifically, Markup is an Actions extension, which means it allows you to edit or view content.

Other types of extension include Finder, which allows you to customise the Finder; Share Menu, which adds items to the Share Menu in the Finder and apps which support it; and Today, which adds elements to the Today View in Notification Center.

Mail has another, smaller change as well. It handles threaded messages differently, displaying both the first name and initial of everyone in the thread in the message preview, rather than just the name of the most recent sender.