Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mail.app

How do I set a default adress for a contact in mail.app?

nbrier — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:08:22 -0800

How do I change the default address that comes up when I type someone's name in Apple Mail.app? I can't be the only person with this problem (in fact I know I'm not). Every so often someone's secondary email starts to come up first when I type their name in mail.app (for instance I'm trying to write someone at work and it goes to their home address).

Is there any way to fix this and set the default address for a contact?

No RSS in Leopard's Mail.app

Fezboy! — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:36:01 -0800

RSS in Mail.app yields Invalid URL error. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? So I spent my afternoon at work install Leopard because I didn't want to do any actual work. I go to add MeFi's RSS (File>Add RSS Feeds...) and get this: "Invaild Feed URL." Bastards!

So I monkey with the URL a bit, trying 'http://' for 'feed://' and '.xml' for '.rss' and on and on. With no syndicated goodness flooding my inbox. For this I am sad. Have any other early adopters had this problem? What have you done to fix it?

Switching from Entourage 04 to iCal/Mail/Address Book

4ster — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:21:00 -0800

I just switched from Entourage 2004 to Mail.app/iCal/Address Book. What techniques and/or add-ons should I be using? So far, I have only installed a script that allows me to have a different reply to: address than I send from, and I am planning on trying MailTags later tonight, which I think will at least let me categorize archived mail like I could with Entourage. What else should i know?

Ideally, I'm looking for:
- Advice on your best/favorite ways to set up smart folders/smart mailboxes.
- Any opinions on MailActOn (or similar applications)
- Advice on good ways to turn email into events, now that I can't ^E like I could in Entourage.
- Any other good downloads I'm not thinking of.

I use a hosted version of Tracks (tracks.tra.in) for tasks/projects, so I think I'm good there, but I open to suggestions. I also sync to a PalmOS Treo, in case that is relevant.

Thanks in advance. Going from having everything in one application to having it in four seems a little weird, but I'm committed to learning how best to do this.

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?

Multiple addresses at the same domain in Entourage?

bcnarc — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 20:28:58 -0800

In OS X mail.app, it is possible to configure an email account and associate it with multiple email addresses by separating the addresses with a comma in the preference pane. This is useful if you have multiple addresses at the same domain because it allows you to reply to mail and send new messages using the address you choose without having to configure two accounts.

Is something similar possible in Entourage? I am trying to achieve the same functionality for someone who needs to use Entourage for other reasons and am hitting a wall. Any help is most appreciated. (example inside) Example:

You have two addresses:

name@domain.com
company@domain.com

Since they deliver to the same mailbox, by setting up the account once and having this functionality you can do away with the reply to field when responding to a message sent to the 'secondary' address and when you want to send a new message you just choose what account it comes from.

Maily maily moo, some questions for you

Popular Ethics — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:28:20 -0800

Two quick Mail.app questions: How do I "whitelist" an address, and how do I get it to work behind a proxy 1) Mail.app's spam filter is a little aggressive. I often lose emails from my Ultimate captain, and from my VOIP's voicemail-email service. I tried writing a "rule" to move any message from certain senders to my inbox, but it didn't have the intended effect. Is there an easy way to make a "white list" of senders who are never filtered?

2) My work uses a proxy server for all internet traffic. Is there anyway to configure mail so that I can still download from Yahoo's Pop3 server, and send to yahoo's SMTP server?

Thanks in advance

encrypted IMAP storage?

about_time — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 06:05:09 -0800

Almost all my incoming mail messages are unencrypted. I use IMAP and access my mail from multiple macintoshes (using Mail.app). I want to store all my mail on my IMAP server encrypted so that my admins can't read it. So, is there a simple plugin to mail.app that will store each mail encrypted and decrypt on the fly and show the original attachments? I can program well, but haven't written a bundle for mail.app.

Other FYIs: I have an account on the IMAP server which is unix. I don't have root on that computer, but there is a procmail hook on it. I have root on another machine that has IMAP running on it, but there are other users of that IMAP server.

A long time ago i used to encrypt all incoming messages with a PGP key in my procmail script. But this made receiving attachments impossible since you can't do attachments recursively (i.e., pic inside the s/mime encryption); can you? In any case, I wasn't using Mail.app at the time, and I don't believe mail.app will unencrypt and then look for attachments inside what it decrypted.

One solution is that I could set up all my mail to be IMAPed to an encrypted disk on my always on mac desktop. ButcCan you think of something where I don't have to set up and manage my own IMAP server? I'm hoping for something that allows me to use the admin support I have on my existing IMAP server --- I don't have a lot of time at my job to adminstrate my own services.

One last clarification: I don't think the admins are reading my mail. More precisely, i don't like my old mail appearing on backups for eternity, and I worry about recent hacks/breakins on our IMAP server. So I'm ok with a solution that leaves new mail in plaintext for short periods of time (say 12 hours).

Mail.app Hates Me And My Mail

rossination — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:45:15 -0800

I have a Gmail account and a university email account (IMAP), both configured through OSX's Mail (the IMAP is only for sending mail; all incoming mail comes through the Gmail account). Lately, none of my email has been showing up in Mail (I know this because I've started keeping Gmail Notifier on the menubar as a double-check). It's not just that it takes a while to collect; it just never actually appears in my Mail.app inbox. I've double checked all my settings against Google's instructions, and even removed and re-added the mailbox. Any ideas as to what could have gone wrong and how I could fix it?

Slow Mac connection.

lackutrol — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 13:06:25 -0800

My Mac is suddenly downloading very slowly. Everything else is working fine, but any application that connects with the Internet is having some kind of problem. Safari takes several minutes to load any page, and Azureus is much slower than before. I started noticing this a few days ago and it only seems to get worse.

I am also having a problem with Mail.app that is probably unrelated--it is not saving messages as drafts or in the Sent folder.

I'm on a Time Warner cable connection in NYC, running OS 10.4.3. Can anybody help me with any of these issues?

How to get groups out of Outlook Express on Windows?

sfz — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:22:37 -0800

OK - I just bought an iMac to replace our dying Windows machine at home. I've successfully moved over almost everything - email (thanks to emailchemy), bookmarks, contacts, calendar items, documents. But I'm stuck on one thing - how can I reproduce the groups of contacts from our old windows outlook express address in the OS X address book? I would rather not have to recreate them one address at a time if I can avoid it. Thanks!

Mail.app putting line breaks in long URLs. Make it stop!

jragon — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 11:24:10 -0800

Mac OS X Mail.app putting annoying line breaks into long URLs. [more inside] If I use Apple Mail to send a message with a long line, Mail seems to wrap the line automatically with no indication while composing that this will occur.

This is a big problem for URLs, because they get chopped into two lines (with a space at the end of the first line) which causes problems on at least some clients (Eudora and Outlook on Windows, as well as web based gmail from what I see)

Any tricks for getting around this? I don't see it between two Macs, so I imagine it could possibly be a setting on the sender or receiver's side that could fix this.

Mail Duplicates

bonaldi — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 22:03:26 -0800

Tidying my email: Over the years I've developed hundreds of different folders for messages. They're currently all in Mail.app's MBOX format. I want to sort them into one big gmail-style archive folder, and get rid of the many, many duplicates.

Is there any way to automate searching for the duplicates?

To get a text message on my cell phone when a client emails my regular account, should I use SMS or POP?

adamrice — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:03:36 -0800

So I just got a whizzy new cellphone with SMS and a POP client.

I want to get some kind of text message whenever a client sends e-mail to my regular account, and I've already got this working, basically. My cellular service is with T-Mobile. I use OS X and Mail.app; I've already set it so that, when a Mail.app rule is matched ("sender is in Clients group"), an Applescript is triggered that fires a short e-mail message showing the sender and subject line of the client's message to a special mobile-only e-mail account I set up. It might be nice to include the first few words, too, but I haven't gotten that far.

Questions: Would it make more sense to do this by SMS? If so, how would I send the message via SMS? Right now I've got the phone polling my mobile-only POP account every 30 minutes, and it seems to be a slow process. I'm also not sure what the billing hit would be per SMS message or for checking POP e-mail.