eMail on the Mac is a great experience whether you use the
builtin Mail.App or Microsoft Entourage. These two mac-only
applications are not the only email clients available on
the platform, but they represent the biggest userbases, and
in my opinion, the best experiences on the platform.
Apple’s Mail.app is a very capable application, which can
pick up multiple accounts of various types over the net.
One feature that sets it apart from the rest is the unified
inbox. Rather than display each account in its own folder
tree like outlook and others, Mail.app unifies the inboxes
into a master inbox, master sent items, master junk folder,
etc. You are still able to expand the master mailboxes like
a folder tree and select the individual account inboxes,
etc.
To start off, no email journey on the mac is complete
without first visiting
hawkwings.net. This blog is the hub of
all things mail.app related.
One of the newest resources there is a list of templates for mail.app.
Mail.app can be used to send mail based on
pre-designed templates that will render in most
modern email clents. Number of people are creating
new templates and making them available for
download. HawkWings has compiled a list several of
these available collections.
The NovCon Design Group also has designed a few of our
own templates available here for free. |
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There are a few extensions which are indispensible.
First up is widemail. Why Apple refuses to do a
three-verticle-pane view in Mail.App is beyond me,
as for anyone with a wide screen, it is by far the
best way to view your inbox. Luckily Dane Harnett
came to the rescue with this plugin that adds that
functionality. |
| Next up would be GrowlMail, a component of Growl. Growl is a notification system
for your mac. The best way I can describe it is if
you have ever used msn messenger or google talk on
the pc, or outlook, and gotten the little
rectangular notification that slides up on the
bottom right corner of your screen to let you know
something happened, that’s kinda like what growl
does. But growl does it with style. Notifications
can look like any number of styled themes, from the
rectangular sliding popup, to a music-video styled
lower-third bar, to a character with a speech
bubble. It does take a little work to get it
installed and running, but is well worth your
time. |
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Spam is a growing problem for any email account.
Mail.App does include some decent spam filtering
support. If you go to your preferences in mail.app and
go to the Junk Mail tab, you can enable Junk Mail
filtering and select one of three modes. It is
recommended to train the system for a while using “Mark
as Junk Mail, but leave it in my inbox”. After you are
happy with the ability of the system to properly detect
spam, you can set the app to automatically move the
messages to a Junk folder. |