Editorials @ Applelust

Jaguar Special Edition - Mail and Address Book Reborn

How long had it been since Apple stopped releasing updates to it's own email client (Emailer released by then Apple spin off Claris) to when they finally graced us all with the very simply named non "i" Mail (or Mail.app for those who remember the early Rhapsody development days)? Far too long for those of us who grew tired of the other options out there. Some people held on to Emailer for dear life... others made the jump to Outlook Express or other clients. Many of use who jumped were very excited to come back into the fold with the first release of Mail. Others moved on up to Carbonized versions of Eudora, Entourage rather than disrupt their daily email life.

So here we are, the first major revision to Mac OS X (and something like the 11th overall) since 10.0 was shipped a short 17 months ago, give or take. Some of you are contemplating taking the leap to full Apple goodness, and others just want to know what to expect if they upgrade.Ok, enough of the history lesson. I will try to cover Mail and Address Book both from a newcomer's viewpoint and from the viewpoint of someone who has been using previous versions of Mail.

The Main Interface

For those who haven't used Mail before, you'll notice that the main mailbox window in Mail is broken up into four essential parts from top to bottom: the toolbar, mailbox contents, the email body. And at the far right, the mailboxes drawer (yes, it does slide in and out just like a real drawer). If you've ever used an email client, the bottom section, where the content is viewed/previewed... then you need no further description. If checking email is completely new to you, then that is the basics of that section. We will go further in depth on the other three sections...

This is Mail

The Toolbar

For those familiar with Mail and/or Mac OS X, then the toolbar at the top should look familiar. It works the same way as the toolbar in the Finder (as well as many other Mac OS X savvy apps work) with regards to organization and use. For those who aren't familiar with it, the toolbar works much like the toolbar in many other email clients or web browsers: Icons to common functions (check mail, reply, etc.) that keep you from having to go to the menu for every task.

The toolbar, ready to make your email experience easier and more efficient.

You can choose up to 23 different icons to your toolbar (although for efficiencies sake, you really should only choose as many as you can fit on the screen), and organize them in the way that makes the most sense for you (you even get separators and space if you feel it's necessary)

Full customization is available for the Toolbar

Your choices are:

• Delete - click to trash the selected email(s)
• Reply - reply to the email
• iChat (new in 10.2) - if the sender is on your buddy list and they are online, it will be solid (otherwise ghosted). Click on it, and an iChat launches with an instant message window for your friend.
• Reply All - reply to the sender and any other people the original email was sent to.
• Forward - forwards the message to a new recipient
• Redirect - similar to forward but sends the identical email on, still from it's initial recipient.
• Compose - create a new email
• Mailboxes - slides the mailboxes drawer on the right in and out. Helpful for those with smaller screens.
• Get Mail - checks the server for new messages
• Print - prints the selected message
• Bounce to Sender - sends an error message to the sender as if the account were false. Good for sending back unwanted email.
• Go Online/Go Offline - particularly useful for modem users. You can set it to online status so that Mail will check for new messages regularly, then set it to offline status so that it doesn't reconnect to your ISP to get more mail automatically.
• Add to Address - ads the email address of the sender to the Address Book
• Address - opens the Address Book application
• Search Mailbox (improved in 10.2) - search columns and contents in a single mailbox or all of them.
• Smaller/Bigger - make the content text smaller or bigger.
• Junk (new in 10.2) - toggle the Junk status of a message (we'll go into Junk more in detail later)
• Customize - pull up this customization menu
• Separator - great when organizing your icons into distinct groups.
• Space/Flexible Space - add gaps between icons and growth areas.

If you feel you've messed up or want to give it a try, the default list is always there for you to choose. You also have the option of viewing Icons, Text, or both Icons and Text. And if you find just too many icons are needed than there is space, Mail has a "Use Small Icons" check box, shrinking them all down for you (new in 10.2).

Mailbox Contents

It may look like a simple list of messages, but the Mailbox Contents can do much more, depending on how you customize it and use it. This shows you the content of the folder (Inbox, Outbox, etc.) in the account (for those with multiple email accounts) you choose or a list of emails that result from a specific search.

Your Mailbox Contents

There are eleven customizable categories to choose from:

• Attachments - a paper clip followed by the number of items appears if the message has an attachment

• Hey look, Tate is online!

  Buddy Availability - if the email is from someone on your iChat buddy list (and in the Address Book), a green droplet will let you know
• Date Received - when your ISP got the message.
• Date Sent - when it was sent by the writer
• Flags - allows you to flag emails for later. Identifies them as important. This column also includes the "Junk" icon if Mail has flagged it as being junk.
• From - shows who the message is from
• Mailbox - shows what account the message was sent to (useful if you have more than one account showing in a single view)
• Number - the email's number
• Size - the physical size of the email message
• To - who the message was sent to

Now, you'll notice something missing from the pull down menu in the picture below: the subject column and the read status column. A blue gel identifies unread messages in the "Read Status" column. Those are the only permanent columns. The rest can be visible or invisible according to your desires.

Choose what Columns you want to use

The order and size of these columns is also customizable. Simply grab the column header in the Mailbox Contents section and drag around. Putting the cursor between columns allows you to expand and shrink a specific column to get it the right size.

You may also notice a sort option just below the "Columns" view in the picture above. It let's you check what column you want all of your messages sorted by. An easier way is to just click on the column header to sort by it just like you would in column view in the Finder. Clicking it again, flips the direction of the sort (ascending or descending). A small triangle identifies which direction the messages are sorted by.

The Mailboxes Drawer

I have too many email addresses. The drawer helps me manage them.

In the drawer, it's all about management. It's useful for organizing your mail into different folders and especially useful for those of us with multiple accounts to manage. For those moving up from previous versions of Mail, you'll notice that the drawer is organized quite a bit differently. Previously, all accounts were kept separate, each with their own sub folders (Inbox, Deleted, etc)... now, instead there are main sections with subsections for each account. Your main sections are:

• In - houses the "Inbox" for all of your email accounts
• Out - houses the "Outbox" for all of your accounts
• Drafts - houses emails that you haven't finished writing yet and want to save for later
• Sent - houses all of the messages that you've already sent
• Trash - houses all of the messages that you've trashed (until they are permanently deleted - set in prefs)
• On My Mac - if you import messages from another program, unique folders will end up here. This is also where you can add more organization for saving emails. Add a "Registration" folder for login/password emails from websites, etc.
• Mac.com - allows you to further organize your .Mac email

If you are a little confused... you aren't the first. The drawer is very customizable, so you actually can view the same piece of mail in different ways and different organizations through the drawer. But don't worry, you'll grow comfortable with it pretty quickly.

You can also view the main sections as large icons.

Setting Up an Account

Well, if you enter your .Mac account information when you install OS X, then it's pretty much done for you. If you have other accounts to worry about, then you'll need to add them too. Go to the menu, choose Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts. The accounts window consists of three tabs: Account Information, Special Mailboxes, and Advanced.

The Account Information tab is like what you'd find on most email clients. You enter the account type (.Mac, POP, or IMAP), description (what it will be called in the drawer), email address, full name, username, password, incoming mail server, and outgoing mail server. There are also options for those requiring special authentication to get their email. The Special Mailboxes tab allows you to decide where to store drafts, sent mail, junk mail, and trashed mail. The Advanced tab, is well, advanced. It lets you decide whether to download all messages locally or leave them on the server, enable/disable the account, and more. It's default settings should be right for most users out there.

The Accounts window is broken up into the basic "Account Information" tab, the "Special Mailboxes" tab, and the "Advanced" tab.

Rules

Rules have improved drastically in Mail from previous versions. Notably, you can have multiple conditions now. For those of you unfamiliar with Rules, they allow you to set up conditions for which actions are taken. Something like: "If the message has a subject containing "Joke of the Day" then move the message to the "Jokes" folder." It's great for organizing your incoming messages and is now more powerful.

Rules now allows for multiple conditions.

Junk Mail

Possibly the biggest addition to Mail is the new "Junk Mail" feature. Apple has written a pretty smart algorithm for identifying junk mail and you can customize it to your needs. When you first open up Mail, the Junk filter is in "Training" mode. What that means is that when it sees what it thinks is junk mail, it flags it and changes the color for you to see. If it is indeed junk mail, leave it there, if it's not, then click the "Junk" icon in the toolbar or choose it from the menu to teach Mail that it is in fact not Junk mail. This works for spam that it misses. I found that out of the box, Mail had about a 90% success rate of identifying junk mail... after training, I'd say it's closer to 99%.

Once you are done training, set it to "Automatic" and it'll move the junk mail to the location you specified in your preferences. You are also given a customization option, allowing you to create your own rule for what to do with junk mail. This is probably the best spam filter I've run into so far, probably because I trained it myself!

Address Book

While it is a separate application altogether in OS X, the address book is traditionally a function of the email client, and only now is it starting to spread it's wings beyond just use in email. Address Book is all about integration in Jaguar. Forming a strong triad of Mail, iChat, and Address Book seemed to be a large goal in this release. Address Book is essentially the glue that brings Mail and iChat together and makes both apps even easier to use.

Here you can see the info for one of our informants in Address Book.

As you can see from the picture above, Address Book can store a wealth of information about a person:

• Name
• Title
• Company
• Phone Number (s)
• Email Address(es)
• Home Page(s)
• AIM Address(es)
• Physical Address(es)
• Notes

All of the above info, and a photograph can be stored in Address Book and used by other applications in OS X. Now you can also see above that the column to the far right shows all of the groups. This works a lot like iTunes where a group is a playlist. You create a group using the "plus" button at the bottom left and just drag the people you want from "All" into there. The second column shows everyone in the specific group, and of course, the third column is the person's card. The buttons above the "Groups" column allow you to contract the window to just the Card.

Adding a person is as easy as adding a group. The "plus" buttons at the bottom of the second column will create a new card. Editing that person is as simple as clicking the edit button below. What it essentially does is make all of the fields live. small "plus" symbols to the left of a category mean you can add another instance of that (add another phone number, etc.). Address book has options for Work, Home, Other, and Custom (fill in whatever you want), so if you have a friend with 6 email addresses, they are welcome here!

Now comes the integration fun. When you are not in edit mode, you can hover over any category and it will be highlighted, click on the category (home, work, etc.) and options will appear unique to that feature.

• All Phone Numbers - you will be given a "large type option." This displays the phone number large enough to fill the screen.
• Regular Email Address - email them.
• .Mac address - email them, visit their .Mac homepage, open their iDisk, or message them in iChat.
• HomePage - go to the website.
• AIM account - message them in iChat
• Address - "Map of" will open that address in Mapquest showing you exactly where it is.

With all of this, Address Book as essentially become the hub of the online integration within OS X. Suddenly, a digitized "Rolodex" can do so much more than a paper "Rolodex." Is this the real theme in Jaguar?

Wish List

Well, much has been improved in Mail since the last version, but there are still some features that I'd love to see in the future:

Mail Views - those who have used Entourage are familiar with this. They are folders with specific filters attached to them, different ways to look at the same messages. You can create a view to see messages from your family, or messages sent since lunch. The messages themselves aren't sent to a physical folder, but are just reorganized in each folder for the stated filter.

Signatures for specific accounts - yes Mail allows for multiple signatures, allows you to choose a specific one when writing a message or chooses one at random. However, it still doesn't let you make specific signatures for specific accounts. If I have a personal email account and a business email account, I would like to have separate signatures or sets of signatures automatically for each account.

More Powerful Flagging - currently you have flag and unflag, but we aren't given an option to state why we flagged the email. Why not more options like "flag for reply" or "flag for forward." Once iCal is released, I hope we see further integration with Mail and flagging to specify appointments, etc. Also, a "flag complete" would be great. Other email clients allow you to not completely unflag a message, just identify that it was once flagged but that task is done.

Phone Integration - you'd have to hope that Apple has more in store for the Address book than to just show phone numbers in large type.

Conclusion

As an OS X early adopter, it would be nearly impossible for me to draw any sort of negative conclusion from upgrades to Mail and Address Book in Jaguar. For that to happen, Apple would have actually had to remove features or make little to no improvements with this release. What they did do, is make a snazzy little Mail client and Address Book package more integrated and a bit more robust. There is always room to grow... but I think current OS X users and those upgrading for the first time will be happy with both of these applications.

- Marc Messer

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