Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 11 MAIL, ADDRESS BOOK, AND iCAL
Receiving and Managing E-mail
Receiving, reading, and managing e-mail messages are the main tasks that most people are occupied
with when using their mail clients. Mail provides some nice features for this whether you
deal with a few messages from a single account every day or you deal with hundreds from multiple
accounts.
Checking and Reading New E-mail
Mail is set up, by default, to automatically check for new e-mail in each of your active, online
accounts every five minutes. This interval is adjustable on the General tab of Mail’s System Preferences
(Figure 11-6) from the “Check for new mail” drop-down list. Of course, you are always
free to manually check your e-mail by clicking the Get Mail button in Mail’s toolbar or by using
one of the Get Mail options in the Mailbox menu.
Figure 11-6. The General tab of Mail’s preferences
By default, when Mail discovers new messages for one of your accounts, the new messages
are downloaded into the Inbox associated with the account, and the “new mail” sound will play,
notifying you of new mail. Additionally, the number of unread messages in your Inbox will
appear on the Mail icon in the Dock (known as badging), as well as next to your Inbox. Unread
messages in the message list area of the Message Viewer window will be flagged with a small
blue dot that will go away when you select the message to read.
NOTE In the Mailboxes area along the left side of Mail’s Message View window, Mail provides
a single Inbox that will expand into separate Inbox folders for each account. This allows you to
view your messages from different accounts either together by selecting the Inbox item or
separately by account by selecting one of the subitems under Inbox.