First steps: Set up your view in Mail and master your Inbox
The main window is straightforward, but you can tweak it to your taste
MAIL’S LEFT SIDEBAR gathers all of your email accounts into a single Inbox folder, showing all your incoming mail in the list to the right. Click the disclosure triangle to see individual accounts, and you can select one to list its incoming mail individually. Each account’s badge shows how many messages are unread, totalled up for the Inbox when collapsed. If there’s a connection problem with one of your email accounts, its badge becomes a lightning bolt; simply click this to check its settings.
Your Apple email address — @mac. com, @me.com or @icloud.com — is added to your Inbox when you sign in to iCloud in System Preferences and select Mail. To add other accounts, go to Mail > Add Accounts. Gmail, Microsoft Exchange and other services are listed for simplified
login, although you may be taken to Safari to enter your password. To add an existing email account with any ISP or a private server, select Other Mail Account.
Your email address and password should be enough to get you set up, but check with your provider if any other settings are required. See details of all your accounts in Mail > Preferences > Accounts. (This is different from Mail > Accounts, which takes you to a System Preferences pane to manage all your cloud services, not just email.)
WHERE’S MY MAIL?
Most email accounts use IMAP, meaning all your messages live on the provider’s email server. This avoids the confusions of the old POP3 system, where messages were downloaded to the first device you used to read them. Note that while Mail keeps a cache of existing emails on your Mac, this isn’t a backup.
If you want to store messages permanently on your Mac, select them in the list using Shift or Cmd, then click the file box icon in the top toolbar or press Ctrl+Cmd+A. They’re deleted from the mail server and go into Mail’s Archive folder, seen in the sidebar, which is stored on your Mac and contains subfolders for all relevant accounts. The iCloud subfolder is synced everywhere you access your Apple email; archives from other accounts are only on your Mac. You could set up a Mail Rule (see more on how to do that on page 33) to archive all messages as they reach a certain age.
By default, deleted emails are also kept in the Archive folder. In Mail > Preferences > Viewing, you can opt instead to Move discarded messages into Trash. They’ll be deleted when you then empty the Trash.