From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac (2018)
Receiving and reading email
- [Instructor] Now let's touch on the basics of receiving and reading email. Previously, we learned about the path an email follows to get from the sender's computer to the recipient's. Now, once an email arrives on your computer, depending on the email client you're using, there are usually a couple of options available for reading and managing your messages. For this example, I'm using macOS's Mail program, but pretty much everything I'll show you here applies to other email clients as well. So, first of all, when new email arrives, it ends up in your inbox by default. You'll usually have some notification of how many messages you have. You can see my inbox is currently selected and I see the number three here, indicating I have three unread messages. And you can see blue dots next to the three messages that I haven't read yet. So, with the inbox selected, I can browse through my messages. To read a message, I just click it once. Most email clients have a split window like this in which you can see your list of messages in one pane and read the selected message in another one. In most cases, you can also double click a message to open it up in its own window, which can be useful if it's a long message and you want more space in which to read it. So I could just take this window here and expand it. I'll just close that for now. You could still see the message here. Now, if a message is important or something you want to get back to later, you can mark it by clicking the flag button here. Notice that puts a little flag icon both here and next to the message. When I'm done with that, I can just click the flag icon again to remove it. Now, alternately, if you want to remember to read a message, you might want to mark the message as unread, which keeps the message highlighted as an unread message. A simple way to do this is to right click on the message and choose Mark as Unread. And you can see that puts the blue dot next to the message and you'll remember to get back to it later. All email clients also let you create folders to further organize your messages if you like. In macOS Mail, you can choose Mailbox, New Mailbox, and come up with a name for your mailbox, and then choose a location to save it. I'll just cancel that for now. Now, in other clients, it may be File, New Folder to create a new mailbox, but the end result is that you have a folder into which you can drag related files to keep them organized. So, for example, I could create a new mailbox. Save it on my Mac. Call it Work Stuff. And you can see that now appears here. And I could drag this email that's work-related to that folder, and then I'll be able to select that folder to get to all of my work-related emails that I've dragged in here. Now, along those lines, all email clients also allow you to create what are called rules. When you create a rule, you set up parameters for your email client to automatically check out incoming messages. For instance, you could create a rule that all emails from your boss's email address get automatically moved into your work folder. The steps for creating rules vary from client to client, but you should be able to find instructions for creating them in the client's help file. And, as we learned earlier, most applications have a help menu right up here. So those are just a couple things to keep in mind about receiving and reading your incoming email messages.
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