Creating, sending, and receiving email

Last week we began our exploration of Apple’s Mail application. Having read through that lesson, you’re familiar with the makeup of the Mail window. This week we’ll turn from geography to communication—creating, sending, and retrieving email. Taking it from the top …

The New Message window

Click the toolbar’s New Message button, or press Command-N, and the New Message window appears. It has its own toolbar that contains, by default, the following buttons: Send Message, Attach Document, Show Format Bar, Show/Hide Photo Browser, and Show/Hide Stationery Pane. Like Mail’s toolbar, this one is also customizable. Just Control-click (right-click) the toolbar, choose Customize Toolbar, and from the sheet that appears drag the tools you want to the toolbar. From this moment forward, those buttons will appear in every New Message window (or at least until you hold down the Command key and drag them out). We’ll explore these buttons further later in the lesson.

The top portion of the New Message window.

Below the toolbar are the To, Cc, and Subject fields. They shake out this way.

The To field: This is where you enter the email addresses of those you wish to send the message to. You can do this in a couple of ways. The first is to simply click in the field and type the address—buppo@example.com, for instance. To enter multiple email addresses in this manual way, place a comma after each recipient (except the last one, of course).

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