Mail actually hides the majority of the heading lines that help identify and route an e-mail message to its rightful destination. By default, all you’ll see is the filtered heading,which includes only the From, Date, To, and Subject fields. This is great unless for
some reason you need to display the entire mes-sage header in all its arcane madness. If you do, press Ô+Shift+H. You can toggle back to the fil-tered heading by pressing the same shortcut.
If Aunt Harriet isn’t in your Address Book yet, this is a good time to add her.
With the message entry selected in the list, choose Message➪Add Sender to Address Book or just press the convenient Ô+Y keyboard shortcut. The person’s name and e-mail address are automatically added to your Address Book. To add more information in the Address Book, however, you have to open that application separately.
To reply to a message in Mail, follow these steps:
1.
To respond to a message from the message list, click the desired mes-sage entry and then click the Reply button on the toolbar.To respond to a message that you’ve opened in a message window, click the Reply button on the toolbar for the message window.
If a message was addressed not just to you but also to a number of dif-ferent people, you can send your reply to all of them. Instead of clicking the Reply button, click the Reply All button on the Mail window toolbar.
(This is a great way to quickly facilitate a festive gathering, if you get my drift.)
You can also add carbon copies of your message to other new recipi-ents, expanding the party exponentially; more on carbon copies later in the section, “Raise the Little Flag: Sending E-Mail.”
If you’d like to send your reply under a different account, click the Account drop-down list box and choose the account. This is a handy method of re-routing a message that you received in your home e-mail account to your office account.
Mail opens the Reply window that you see in Figure 14-5. Note that the address has been automatically added and that the default Subject is Re: <the original subject>. Mail automatically adds a separator line in the message body field that reads On <day><date>at<time>, <addressee>
wrote:, followed by the text of the original message; this is done so that the addressee can remember what the heck he wrote in the first place to get you so happy/sad/angry/indifferent. The original text is indented and colored blue to set it apart. If you like, you can click in the Subject line and change the default subject line; otherwise, the cursor is already sitting on the first line of the text box, so you can simply start typing your reply.
2.
After you complete typing your reply, you can select text in the mes-sage body and apply different fonts or formatting.To change your reply’s formatting, click the Fonts button on the mes-sage window toolbar. From the window that appears, you can choose the font family, the type size, and formatting such as italic or bold for the selected text. Click the Close button on the Fonts window to con-tinue. (If you like menus, you can also choose Format from the menu and make changes from there.)
To apply color to the selected text, click the Colors button on the message window toolbar and then click anywhere in the color wheel that appears to select that color. You can also vary the hue by moving
Book I Chapter 14
Using Apple Mail
Receiving and Reading E-Mail Wisdom
the slider bar at the right of the Colors window. After you find the color that expresses your inner passion, click the Close button on the Colors window to continue.
3.
To add an attachment, click the Attach button on the toolbar.Mail displays a familiar file Open dialog. Navigate to the to-be-attached file, select it, and click the Open button to add it to the message. (More on attachments in the upcoming section, “Attachments on Parade.”)
4.
When you’re ready to send your reply, you have two options. You can click the Send button to immediately add the message to your Out folder, or you can click the Save As Draft button to store it in your Drafts folder for later editing.After a message is moved to the Out folder, it is sent either immediately or at the next connection time that you specify in Mail Preferences (more on this in the section “Checking Mail automatically,” later in the chapter). However, saving the message to your Drafts folder will not send it. Read the next section for the skinny on how to send a message stored in your Drafts folder.
When you reply to a message, you can also forward your reply to another person (instead of the original sender). The new addressee receives a mes-sage containing both the text of the original mesmes-sage that you received and your reply. To forward a message, click the Forward button on the Mail tool-bar instead of Reply or Reply to All.
If you don’t want to include the text of the original message in a reply, choose Mail➪Preferences➪Composing and disable the Quote the Text of the Original Message check box.
Figure 14-5:
Reply to an e-mail message.
By default, Mail checks your spelling as you type and also underlines any words that it doesn’t recognize. (Very Microsoftian.) I like this feature, but if you find it irritating, you can turn it off. Just choose Mail➪Preferences➪ Composing and disable the Check Spelling as I Type check box.