Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mac and email

e-mailing multiple addresses within one Entourage Contact.

jmd82 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:43:21 -0800

Using Entourage to send to multiple e-mail addresses with one Contact. Staff members are using Entourage for e-mailing groups. These groups often contain people with multiple e-mail addresses, and for various reasons, all these e-mail addresses must be contacted. So Jon Doe will have a home and work e-mail. However, when sending to a Contact with a Group (or even individually), it will only send to their default address instead of all listed, like Outlook would.

So my question is: Is there a way to send to all e-mail addresses within one contact by default? Some users have hundreds of contacts, each with multiple e-mail addresses listed, in their distribution groups, and we'd rather avoid having to go back and modify all their groups.

The Perfect Mail Client

tejolote — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:28:57 -0800

I switched to mac recently, and hate applemail. I don't think thunderbird will do everything I want, at least it didn't a few years ago. I want something like Pocomail, easily scriptable and enhanceable, and perfectly reliable (and easy and standard enough for me to fix on me own when there are problems). But Pocomail doesn't have a client for macs.

Also, I am going to have to gamble that whatever I pick will keep being updated and maintained over the years. I have a lot of mail and I really hate to move it around. In fact (I have some mail I've been unable to get to after a year now, but that's another question altogether).

Suggest mail applications for mac, preferably with some of the suggested parameters! Help me get to read (and sort) my vast tracts of mail.

I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help?

kdern — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:47:16 -0800

I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help? We use Exchange at work (MS Exchange 2007), and I am on a mac. I don't like Entourage, so I have been accessing my email via POP on a gmail account. I am very happy with this setup.

The problem is that since it's POP, emails that I send from gmail are not synced back to the Exchange server, which means they are not backed up with all the other company emails. If I want to continue using gmail, I have to figure out a way to get my outgoing emails backed up.

Gmail cannot fetch emails via IMAP, only POP, so that's not an option.

I considered OSX Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird, but I find Gmail to be far superior.

The only option I've thought of is this... to have all my outgoing emails automatically bcc'ed to an internal email address, which we would set up just for this purpose. Then all my outgoing emails would be backed up. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in gmail.

Can anyone help? Please don't make me use Entourage!

Why is my mom's Gmail account constantly CAPTCHA'ing her?

woot — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:18:19 -0800

My mom's Gmail account keeps throwing up the CAPTCHA at login, blocking her mail clients. Why? We use Google Apps for IMAP access to a family domain and it's worked great for over a year. But within the last month, my mom's Mac Mail (10.5.6, updates current) and iPhone (1st gen) have been unable to access her account with IMAP. When we troubleshoot (over the phone), it appears that Google keeps putting up a CAPTCHA for her web login, and so her IMAP clients can't connect.

This keeps happening, but only to my mom's account. We will "fix" it for a day or two but then the CAPTCHA goes back up. We can get her mail clients working so I know we have the right settings, but the fix seems to "expire."

What could be causing this? Is someone banging away at her email account, and Google's throwing up the CAPTCHA in self-defense? Is there a benign explanation for this, or should I worry that someone's trying to get into her mail?

She's pretty good about avoiding viruses and suspicious stuff -- she came close to logging into a bank phishing site a few years ago and learned her lesson -- but I can't guarantee she hasn't done something dumb. She is on a Mac (and always has been) and I don't think she's used a PC to access email in years. I know Macs aren't virus-free but I'm having a hard time connecting this Gmail behavior to her computer.

What's going on? Anyone heard of this happening? What should I do?

Thanks. I apologize in advance if I only have partial info here -- I'm working on this with her over the phone and you know how it is with parents and remote tech support.

Help me administer Mac OSX Mail Server

rkent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:18:40 -0800

Help me administer a mail server on OS X. Some friends and I have run a small web / database / email server for several years. Originally it was Linux, which I'm relatively familiar with; a while back we moved to OS X (Server) at the behest of one of the guys. Now for various reasons his availability for server admin duties is severely curtailed, and I'd like to pick up the slack rather than pestering him with questions.

Most pressing is the email server. I have no idea how to run it. I've tracked down pages like this, and I'll continue to search the Apple website, but any third-party FAQs or HOWTOs would be very appreciated. Even the really basic stuff, like: what is the name of the mail server process / executable(s), and where are their config files? What logs should I check when there are errors? Basically, help me approach the OSX server utilities with my Linux-based brain.

An additional level of difficulty is presented by the fact that I'll be doing any admin 100% at the command line; I don't have a Mac and so I lack the GUI server tools.

Mac Address Book to Microsoft Excel?

bibbit — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:08:45 -0800

My main computer is a Mac (iBook) and I use the Address Book and Apple Mail. I also manage the email list for a group, and I need to be able to export the list of email addresses to either Excel (preferably) or Word. I haven't figured out how to do that. The contacts are all separate addresses in my Address Book (people come and go on the list so I need to be able to find and delete people easily). I need to send the whole list of email addresses to people using PCs often enough that I'm willing to buy a program to help me to do this if necessary.

In other words, how do I get a list of email addresses off Address Book and into Excel, Word, or some program where I can easily translate the email addresses into Excel or Word?

How to transfer Netscape mail emails and address book from a broken PC to Thunderbird on a new iMac

mbarryf — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:42:07 -0800

I need to transfer Netscape email addresses and emails from a broken PC to Thunderbird (to be installed) on a new iMac. How do I do it? My wife's PC hard drive has failed. However, although the Windows portion of the drive is bad (booting Windows or accessing its components results in bad noises), I'm sure we can access the data from the drive if we put it into an external USB enclosure.

The most important thing to do is to get the Netscape mail emails and address book into the Mac so that either Mac mail or (we'll happily use) Thunderbird can use them.

Assuming that we can get this stuff onto some folder (where should we put it?) in the Mac, and we then install Thunderbird, how can we get Thunderbird to import this information?

How do I disable Mail on my mac?

bluefly — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:24:01 -0800

Is there a way to disable Mail.app on my mac (OS 10.4.11)? It pops up whenever I mistakenly click on a mailto link. I don't use it for my email, so it's really annoying. Googling suggests that you can go to the Preferences menu in Mail, but that's greyed out for me, as I've never ever used the program before. I use my departmental webmail. I'd like to eventually figure out how to redirect the mailto links to some other email software/account, but for now, just disabling it will be fine.

How can we make our save the date email classy?

david1230 — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:35:06 -0800

How can we make our save the date email classy? We need to send a Save the Date email for our July wedding tonight. The future Mrs. david1230 wants to make it classy, but not classy. How can we do that?

I thought about an html email, but it'd be tough to ensure it works in all clients, and I don't really believe in html email anyway. I also thought of making a jpg, but I don't have photoshop. Is there a free Mac image editor I could use to make something? Do you guys have other creative ideas?

Please find my email! It's hiding.

pised — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:21:54 -0800

Where did my email go? Mail.app has lost an important email message that is stuck somewhere in between sending on my end and receiving on the receiver's end. How can I get it back? In the past couple of days, my Mail.app on my Macbook has been acting up -- it's not frozen, but it refuses to send and receive messages. I have to force quit (it won't quit on its own) and when that happens, it warns me that any unsaved changes (i.e. the email message I just sent which is now floating out in the interwebs) will be lost. When this happened yesterday, I lost a short email that I had to rewrite and send out again. It had been working fine for most of the day today until I sent out an important email to my thesis supervisor -- I hit send and the message disappeared, but didn't send. It's not in my sent folder (because it clearly wasn't sent) and it's not in my drafts folder (because it's not a draft). Mail.app is hooked up to my university SunJava IMAP email account, which I can get to, and I can send and receive mail in it; it's clearly a Mail.app issue.

When I log in to the web interface for the e-mail account, there is an 8K message in the "Drafts" folder with the correct subject line and recipient, but when I open it there is no text in the message.

Somebody, please, please, please tell me where my email message to my supervisor is hiding and how I can get it back.

Is there a way to create folders or otherwise organize my email inbox?

iamkimiam — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:24:08 -0800

Is there an app/script/somethin'-sweet I can install on my Mac(s) that will allow me to organize my email INBOX? I'd like to be able to group, folder, or rearrange the items in my email inbox so that I can deal with them more efficiently. Viewing by subject/date/time/etc. will not solve my organization problem. I do NOT want to take them out of my inbox in any way (my rule is that I can't do that until I've dealt with it). I'm currently using Apple Mail, and would like to continue to do so. Thanks!

How to read .msg files on a Mac?

Coherence Panda — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:56:33 -0800

I've got a bunch of (important) single .msg files that I want to read on my Mac (10.5.x). Any advice? Any tool that converts entire mailboxes doesn't seem to apply, and the only dedicated .msg reader I could find is broken. Renaming as .txt doesn't work either. Nor does Emailalchemy or NeoOffice. Help!

How can I use my host's SMTP to send mail when I have my address set to forward incoming mail?

churl — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:18:04 -0800

How can I use my name@my-domain.com email address to send email, if the same address is set to forward incoming mail to another address? I am using Mac OS 10.5, Mail.app, and an iPhone.

I have a site and domain name -- let's say it's my-domain.com -- hosted by 1and1.com. I use name@my-domain.com as my primary email address, but I have set my host to forward incoming email at that address to a MobileMe account: name@me.com. I want to continue to give out name@my-domain.com as my email address. I want to, for the time being, continue to use MobileMe (name@me.com) for my actual mailbox.

The rub is, because mail that's sent to name@my-domain.com is currently forwarding to name@me.com, any replies I send come from name@me.com. I have tried to set up Mail.app to use my web host's outgoing SMTP server (smtp.1and1.com), using the settings they describe (Port 25, Password authentication, etc), but it does not work; it gives the error "The server stmp.1and1.com cannot be contacted on port 25." I expect this is because I don't have a real "mailbox" set up with the host using that email address, only a forwarder.

So the question: is there any way to have my outgoing mail come from name@my-domain.com? For example, is there maybe a way to set up a @my-domain.com mailbox and have MobileMe go out and pull new messages into my @me.com address? Or can I somehow set up Mail.app to use my host 1and1's SMTP server to send mail, when the same email address is set to forward incoming mail? Or is there another service I can use to make this work?

Cheers, and thanks in advance.

Multiple Users, Mail & IMAP

einekleine — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:38:16 -0800

At my work, multiple users access a single IMAP account via webmail. Is there any way I can configure my Mail.app so I can use this account without altering the mailbox on the server? I'd like to delete and move messages about on Mail while leaving the emails as they are for everyone else. Thanks!

Apple Mail.app list selections (and deletes!)

zpousman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:17:21 -0800

Apple Mail.app question: I'm setting up a friend with Apple's Mail (mail.app 3.5 on Leopard 10.5.5). Everything is great -- it works like a charm. Except for something that is different than his old client (AOL for Mac -- ack!): When a message is selected, and you delete it, the selection moves "UP" the list, selecting the *prior* message, not "DOWN" to the *next* message. This is exactly the opposite of AOL and Outlook and other mail clients. Anybody know of a terminal hack on defaults write or another way to swap this behavior? I have seen the tip to use option+delete, which kinda works, but it gives up the selection entirely, which requires the user to now select again in the list. This is, um, sub-optimal in the extreme since it requires the user to pick back up the mouse.

I have googled to no avail. Anybody care to help me with search terms is welcome (I found the same complaint from Mac os 10.0 from 2000, but...)

Embedded email images what?

hapticactionnetwork — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:28:56 -0800

What is going on when I sent an attached image from Mail (on my Mac) to an aol email address? So, someone who runs a website wants to promote an event i'm hosting, and asked for a promotional image. Great!

But, when I tried to send the image (a jpeg, using Mail, on my Mac, 10.5.2, from a gmail account) he said the photo would "not open because it's embedded in the email text area."

He asked if I could resend the photo as an attachment, but I'm pretty sure that's what I did the first time. Is there something I'm not understanding? I clicked the "attach" button in Mail, made sure the "send windows-friendly attachments" checkbox was checked, and selected the file like I usually do. I kind of suspect it has something to do with the fact that he's using aol, but I'm open to the possibility that it's something I'm doing.

Also, I tried searching the wider web for information about this, and some of it was helpful, but it was all a little over my head. I won't be offended if you explain what's going on to me like I'm an infant.

"Mark As Unread" Doesn't Work For Me Anymore

rossination — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:52:12 -0800

How do you organize your email? How can I better organize my emails and be a better email-user? I use Gmail (with both a Gmail account and a .edu account both forwarded to it, and Gmail set up to send email as the @gmail and the @.edu account), Apple Mail, and occasionally read emails on my cell phone via Google mobile. My Gmail is setup via IMAP to sync with my Mac, so whatever I do to an email on Gmail or on my phone will show up as a change when I get home and look at Mail on my mac.

Right now, I'm just reading emails and marking as read, and not archiving, tagging, or foldering anything. In a way, this suits me fine -- Gmail and Spotlight searches are effective enough that I can find most old, lost emails pretty readily. More importantly, though, I find myself often missing (more accurately, forgetting about) emails and not getting back to people on stuff. In other words, once something is read, it's read -- I don't have a better system for tracking followup. I get the feeling that I'm not really using email the *right* way -- my inbox is not 0, it's 2338 messages, most of which have been dealt with.

What does everyone else do in this situation? With Spotlight and tags and searching, it seems silly to file emails as they come in, but maybe that's what I should be doing? Or are there simple ways to setup automatic filing and tagging? How does IMAPed Gmail work with Mail with regard to tags?

I realize my question is rather broad and open ended, but I'm pretty clueless about this. Any explanations, tips, tricks, links, etc. help.

Day of the Deleted Message part 17

nowonmai — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:37:58 -0800

I have a long-winded question about deleting zombie messages from Apple's mail.app. I am trying to get rid of some unwanted email on my Mac, and finding it surprisingly difficult.

Mac OSX 10.4, downloading email from a Microsoft exchange server by POP3 because that's what the IT guys said to do.

Once a week or so I get an email that's really intended for somebody else with the same name as me in the same organization. The emails have 300-odd addresses in the the "To:" line, including a dozen or so distribution lists, to one of which I must have been mistakenly added. I have no idea how to get myself off these lists, so that is unfortunately not the answer.

Anyway, Mail.app just stalls and has to be force-quit when trying to download these messages. I then log into webmail, delete the offending message, and everything's OK again.

Except there are a whole bunch of these messages on my computer now, and try as I might I can not delete them. They just respawn. If I move them to a folder, they respawn in my inbox and now I have more copies. I have tried the rebuild mailbox command. I have tried deleting .emlx files that contain these messages - this deletes the contents of the messages, but the headers seem to stay in the system somewhere, and now my inbox is full of disembodied headers.

Does anybody have any ideas what else I can do? Are there other files I can delete without borking up all the rest of my mail? (My saved mail from my boss and colleagues is important, and there's many megabytes of it). Can I edit some file somewhere by hand to remove database lines containing a certain string? Can I export and reimport my messages in a way that will allow me to strip out the dodgy ones? Is there some Voodoo trick that might help? I have googled extensively, but the universal answer seems to be "rebuild mailbox", which just doesn't help.

How do I unlock my Juno mailbox?

monospace — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:08:13 -0800

My Juno program was corrupted and the mail problems were that I couldn't access my sent file and when I sent out an e-mail it would go into the "out" box and eventually would be sent again (sometimes multiple times). I'm been wrestling around with an e-mail problem for days. My Juno
program was corrupted and the mail problems were that I couldn't access
my sent file and when I sent out an e-mail it would go into the "out"
box and eventually would be sent again (sometimes multiple times). I
have reinstalled Juno but still no sent file. This pops up
occasionally on the screen:

The mailbox "-/Library/Mail/POP-mymail@mail.juno.com/Sent
Messsages.mbox is currently locked by "My-Name-computer.local".
If you open a mailbox that is already in use you may damage it.

I cannot figure out what to do and can't seem to find anyone who CAN
tell me what to do. It is probably something very simple, and I'm
hoping that is the key to the problem.

Can we read the same email without tears?

al_fresco — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:48:49 -0800

Help me use email in a multi-user environment. IMAP is great, but not for more than one user at a time. My boss operates a business where people register for classes through a website. An HTML form generates an email. Administrator checks email for registration details and enters details in a (hosted) FileMaker database, which then sends confirmation email.

All of this worked fine when all of the business could be dealt with by one person, or even one person at a time. Now, the business has grown to the point where there is often a need for two people to be processing the emails at one time, two people at two different desks in two different locations. We have an IMAP email account, and messages are often duplicated when both email clients (Mail.app) are connected at the same time. We also use third-party software (MailTags) to add keywords and notes to individual emails. We now minimize the errors by turning off automatic synching, but there are still collisions and gaps. Users communicate via iChat.

The business is not large enough to warrant shelling out for expensive large-scale enterprise solution. We want the ability to have two or more people at two or more workstations accessing the same information from the same email account at the same time, and to be able to make other users aware of the actions they have taken on those emails, without having to create a separate log.

The hosted FileMaker database works well enough (two users can update the database at the same time, just not the same record). Is there a similar solution for email? Should we somehow route the email account through its own hosted FM database and work from that?

Ideas? Thoughts? Thanks!

Entourage cravings

zenpop — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:34:50 -0800

I actually WANT a Microsoft product. Is it a sickness? Entourage vs. the 'other' email applications. I've used Microsoft's Entourage email application for years and I love it. Nothing compares. I just purchased a new Intel iMac and of course the Entourage version I have won't run on it.

Is there a way just to purchase Entourage without having to purchase the huge glut of Microsoft Office and what not. I don't use those apps and only want Entourage. The older version of Entourage I own was just a simple single purchase, but I don't think they're doing that anymore.

I've tried Thunderbird and its clunky with HORRIBLE message filtering and other problems. Don't like Apple's Mail app, it feels feeble and has horrible searching features. Bah!

Any suggestions from other Mac/Entourage users? Is there a comparable email app that I'm unaware of? Can I just purchase Entourage for Intel Macs without buying the whole suite?

Email in mbox format vs individual message storage ...

woodblock100 — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:46:41 -0800

What are the pros/cons of Apple's move away from using the standard .mbox format in their Mail software? I am a long-time Mac user, now approaching the 'end-of-life' of my current system, a G4 system running OSX 10.3.9 For the ten years that I have been using email, all the programs I have used to control it - starting with Navigator 3.1 - have all used the standard mbox format for storing messages. In OSX 10.4, Apple switched to storing each email message as an individual file (for easier searching, I understand), and this seems to have continued in the newest upgrade.

But what are the negative implications of having hundreds of thousands of messages stored this way? Is such overhead really manageable for the file system? Could such scattered mail ever be converted back into mbox format for use with another system? Does it matter?

At present, I'm thinking that when the time comes to upgrade to a new Mac, I'd rather use Thunderbird, which does seem to use the mbox format. I would appreciate hearing advice/recommendations about potential problems with this.

How to fake IMAP access to a Gmail account, with an extra twist?

jeffxl — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:34:49 -0800

I manage a small network of users, and currently we are using Google Apps for our domain, and getting mail via POP. I'd very much like to fake IMAP access to Google by creating an intermediary/shadow account (either on our web host, or on our local Apple XServe running OS X 10.4 Server) and configuring it like so: 1. Set Google address to forward automatically to shadow account. 2. Set desktops to check mail through shadow account, but send email through Google's SMTP servers, to keep conversations in tact. Adding one more small detail would make this setup next to perfect. As well as using Google's SMTP servers, if outgoing mail was copied to the sent folder of the shadow server, this would allow desktop clients to see sent responses in Mail, as well as keeping conversations intact with Google. Is there a hackish way I can achieve this? I realize I could just set the desktop clients to use the shadow smtp server, and automatically bcc the google address, but that seems messier to me. I would really like all this to be transparent to the users, even if it requires me to do some serious (well, hopefully not too serious) internal modding/custom shell scripting.

Any idea how I might go about doing this?

Or even better, am I missing something really obvious (a simpler solution, perhaps)? We like using Google Apps for the Calendar sharing and Spam filtering mostly, but if better solutions are available for my issue, I'm all ears.

Move a mailbox out of Earthlink Total Access?

spitbull — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 07:04:08 -0800

(Geekfilter) Can I convert Earthlink TotalAccess (WinXP PC) Email (.dat or .csv) mailboxes to Apple Mail (.mbox) mailboxes on a Mac? (AKA: How can Earthlink be this stupid?) OK, so here's the situation, and I'm sorry it's a bit detailed, but the one person who knows the answer to this will need all the facts:

1) Person I am helping has an old Windows PC running XP. She uses Earthlink, and had their "TotalAccess" suite installed (nightmarish).

2) She's moving to a new iMac (10.4). She will continue to use Earthlink (also her DSL provider). So we installed the Mac version of TA on her iMac, and it uses Apple's Mail.app as its default email application. Thank Jobs. (And this question would still apply even if we didn't use Mac TotalAccess, but just wanted to use Mail.app as a standalone app.)

3) Oh shit. The PC version of TA uses a proprietary email client that is capable of exporting its mailboxes in two formats: .csv or .dat (which Google tells me is a "proprietary" earthlink email mailbox format, and may or not be the same thing as the contacts .dat format in Outlook/OExpress -- and I was able to move her addressbook into the Apple Address Book without a problem). The onscreen help says to use the .dat export if you plan to reimport into another version of TA, and .csv to import into other mail applications.

4) Apple Mail.app cannot import .csv mailbox files into its native .mbox format, as far as I can tell. Nor can I find an OS X (or PC) email application that does. Nor can I find a standalone format conversion utility that does, for which I would be willing to pay a modest fee.

5) I want to be able, possibly via an intermediary mail application, possibly via a standalone conversion app, to convert either the .dat or the .csv mailboxes (all in one file in either case) into a standard .mbox file. I am stymied.

Or is there another workaround short of resending (to herself) all the email from the original TA mailboxes on the old PC?

Also, I know the CSV file is not corrupted. I can open it and see everything in Excel.

OS X Mail - autonomous processing of email?

jaimev — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:04:52 -0800

Can Mac OS X Mail be configured to autonomously process email, and based on specific From: and Subject: lines, save the attachment(s) of that email into a specific folder? I'm a dinosaur and prefer to ssh into my Unix based ISP to read my mail. So never having used OS X Mail before, I have no idea if it can do this. I want to be able to send email to a seldom used POP account and have Mail running on my Mac at home automatically check that account and save an attachment based on From/Subject lines. Possible?