Following on from Mark Palmer’s (hey Mr P) “Sorting folders/sub folders in Apple Mail” tip yesterday. I would like to offer a couple of my own Apple Mail related tips.
Resend an email without recreating or forwarding:
Isn’t it annoying when someone tells you they never got your mail. Worst yet, you have to compose a new email and copy from the original email. You could always forward the original email but that clearly shows its a forward, by the date/time sent and other header information.
To avoid the above, you can simply select your original email from your “Sent” folder, then right-click the email and select “Redirect”. This will open your original email email as if it is newly composed email with your original subject line, message body, any attachments you may have added. The only thing you will need to retype are the recipients email addresses. The only thing left to do is hit the “Send” button.
Improve Apple Mail performance:
You may or may not know this, but the way your Apple Mail stores email is database driven. Similar to a database in the traditional sense, say a contacts database, with each email representing each record (like cards on a rolodex). The more records you have, the more sluggish the database performs.
We all know that deleting unwanted emails is supposed to improve your email performance but the reality is that a lot of your hard work has been in vain. The reason being is that the emails you deleted were only marked for deletion in the mail database but not physically deleted.
Okay so what can you do to physically remove these emails, make space savings on the hard drive, and best of all make Apple Mail perform better? Simple – perform a Mail rebuild!
When you perform a rebuild your mail database is scrutinised for any occurrences where a email (or databa
se record) has been marked for deletion and physically deletes the emails.
To perform a rebuild in Apple Mail you need to select your “Inbox”, select the “Mailbox” menu (top-menubar), and then select “Rebuild”. Don’t panic when you see your email messages disappear, this is normal behaviour while your mailbox is being rebuilt.
Please perform the above with a little caution and make sure that your Apple Mail’s email storage is being backed up. It’s in a folder entitled “Mail” in your home folders “Library” folder. Don’t move this folder but instead, simply duplicate it (“Mail copy”) to ensure you have a back up should you need to roll back.