Closing emails behind you

In Mavericks, when I replied to an email, the incoming email closed automatically once the outgoing email had been sent. Since upgrading to Yosemite, this doesn’t happen and the email has to be closed manually. I have searched my settings, searched the internet and can’t find a fix for this. Can you help, please? C Russell I almost always read emails in the preview pane within the main Mail window, so I hadn’t noticed this change, but you’re quite right. Previously, the original message window closed when you hit reply. You could override this by holding Option down when you clicked reply, which led me to hope that the behaviour might have simply reversed for Yosemite, but alas not. Messages opened in their own window now remain behind until you manually close them, whether you reply to them or not. The strangest part is that I have come across forum posts from 2012 asking if there is any way to enable such a feature in OS X. Is it possible this feature wasn’t in Lion, got added in Mountain Lion or Mavericks, then was removed in Yosemite?

History aside, there’s no way to re-enable this feature in Yosemite, so if you don’t want to do all your replying directly from the preview pane, you’ll need a different Mail client. Postbox (postbox-inc.com), which we’ve already mentioned, auto closes messages when you reply, so that’s two votes for it this month!