Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a close look at the Mail Composition Window.
It is easy to overlook the Mail Composition Window.
If you go File, New Message, usually at this point you have a singular purpose in mind
which is to compose this message, or reply to one, and get that thing sent.
You don't actually really look at this window very often.
It is not like Safari or Pages or something where you kind of stare at the window for
awhile.
It appears, you do your task, and then you dismiss it.
So it is easy to miss what is here.
So, let's take a look.
You've got, at the top, some fields you can fill in with things like who you are sending
the email to, the subject line, and where it is coming from.
Notice in From you can select any of your email accounts.
Here are all of my sample email accounts and I can have it going From anyone of those.
These two are even the same email account.
They are just versions of it; me.com and icloud.com versions and I can switch it so that when
somebody replies to this email it comes to that specific address.
There is also a pulldown for signatures and you've got the large area here for composing
your message.
Now you have some control over which fields are here at the top.
If you click on this button you can, for instance, add the bcc field (blind carbon copy field)
and I can put addresses in there.
People that would get this email but nobody else sees who they are as opposed to the cc
field where everybody sees who gets those.
I can add or remove various ones very easily here.
I can even add a Reply To field which can make it look like the email is coming from
this address but then I can put something different in the Reply To so when someone
hits reply it goes there instead.
There is even a Priority field.
Not used by everybody but if you know somebody that pays attention to their email priority
you can send to say a High Priority to make sure that they pay attention to it.
So there is a lot of different options you can do here with these fields.
Now you have some other buttons here at the top as well.
For instance, instead of copy and pasting or dragging and dropping an attachment into
a message you can use this button here.
Just simply select it.
You can also bring up some controls here for the font, font sizes, and styles, and things
like that.
Keep in mind that anytime you use anything like this it is going to go beyond plain text
it really depends on what the receiver at the other end is using.
If they are not using Mac Mail, if they are using a completely different type of way of
reading email, maybe web based, maybe through their ISP, maybe they are on an old windows
machine with an old email client, they may not see exactly what you are sending.
But most people nowadays will see simply things like bold and coloring and some fonts, of
course.
If they don't have the font on their machine that might be a problem as well.
So you want to use this stuff with caution but a little bold here and there for emphasis
doesn't hurt.
You also have the ability to really easily attach photos.
Show or Hide the photo browser there and then you can easily attach photos.
You have this little thing here where you can bring up the stationery.
This attaches ultra customized emails with all sorts of graphics.
A lot of people have trouble reading these if they are not using Mac Mail because they
have to support all the different things that are in these messages.
You can actually add more to here.
You can control click here and customized the toolbar and add some different things
to it.
So, for instance, the ability to quickly switch between rick text and plain text is a button
you can add in or to be able to add a list in or easily format lists, things like that.
You can also add this button which is kind of interesting.
You can add this Append button here and this allows you to append other messages.
So the message I selected is this iBooks email here and you can see I appended it in there.
It is kind of like forwarding an email but I can actually forward multiple emails selecting
them in this window and then hitting this button there.
So there is all sorts of interesting functionality if you poke around and what is available with
these buttons.
Now the message body area that you are typing in is just like any other area you might type
in whether it is in a web browser or in Pages or in TextEdit.
There is a lot of different things you can do.
For instance, if you select the text and hit control and click you get all these controls
here like Spelling and Grammar controls, Substitutions (whether or not you use Smart Quotes or Smart
Dashes.)
Things like that.
Transformations like I can make the entire thing uppercase if I wanted to without having
to retype it.
So there is all sorts of different things that you can do in here that you can add just
like you can anywhere else that you are editing text, just about.
Now here I've attached an image I've just dragged and dropped into the message body
and Yosemite adds the ability to do things with images and PDFs.
I get this little button when I roll the mouse over and I can click and go to Markup.
This gives me some tools for editing here.
I can draw on it for instance.
I can add some text.
All sorts of different things that I can do to this image if I want before I send it.
I hit Done and you can see it has edited the image.
Now when the person receives it they will receive the image with these marks.