Chapter 9

Mail and Other Ways to Say Hello

The main reason most people use computers is to communicate with others. Computers allow us to connect with our family, friends, and business associates, as well as to meet new people. They also give us several different ways to communicate—through e-mail, video, voice, SMS (texting), and so on.

To truly appreciate just how powerful computers have become as communication tools, it’s helpful to reflect on where they started. In the early days of home computing, using a computer to communicate was a rather complicated task, so much so that computer users often avoided using their computers as communication devices. Things have changed tremendously since then: communicating on modern-day computers is a relatively easy and straightforward affair.

The Internet has played a particularly important role in making computers the powerful communications devices they are today. The Internet provides an always-on, universally connectable medium for our computing devices to connect to. This in turn enables us to participate in far-reaching digital dialogs that span the globe.

Macs are the most communication friendly devices made, not least because Apple has engineered its hardware (your Mac) and software (the Lion OS) to make computer communication easy and intuitive. Whatever medium you use to communicate electronically—e-mail, video, audio, or SMS—Macs make it easy to communicate with others, especially other Mac users. And you can do so without having to acquire any third-party software, which enables you to keep your social life thriving as you communicate in a safe, innovative way. In this chapter, you will learn how to make Lion roar using the wide array of communication tools and utilities available for Lion. Let’s get started!

Using Mail

Most communication today is done asynchronously; that is, communication happens in one direction at a time. This is true even if you are on a cell phone. After all, if two people are talking to one another at the same time, neither can be heard. Computers do make synchronous communication possible; however, humans still prefer the get-and-send approach to communicating because we are not very good at talking and listening at the same time. For this reason, many of the communication applications we use today have been designed around our natural tendency to communicate asynchronously.

E-mail applications have always been at the forefront of communication applications for computers. E-mail applications provide us with a way to communicate somewhat naturally with anyone, anywhere in the world. Lion ships with an e-mail application simply called Mail. Fortunately, using it is as simple as saying its name. Let’s explore some this app’s functionality, with an eye toward what it takes to use it effectively.

Mail’s Interface

The Mail app’s interface is sleek and simple. It does away with any extra images, buttons, colors, and annotations that would distract you from reading your e-mail. Its main menu is very easy to use and consists of what you need to create, delete, reply to, and organize various pieces of information in your e-mail accounts (see Figure 9–1).

Figure 9–1. Mail’s main menu bar

Mail includes a handful of functions in addition to its ability to create and send messages. In the next section, we’ll take a look at what each of the functions on its main menu bar does, covering the buttons from left to right.

Reviewing Mail’s Main Menu Functions

The Get Mail button at the far left of Mail’s main menu bar does exactly what it name purports.

If you are impatiently waiting for an e-mail to arrive, pressing this button will override the built-in timer used to check your e-mail periodically and perform what is known as a force check of your e-mail.

Next, you see the Delete and Junk buttons.

The Delete button moves your e-mail to Mail’s trash bin. After a certain period of time, you can request that Mail permanently delete this e-mail to save disk space on your hard drive. The Junk button is a great way to ensure that the mail you are receiving is the mail you want to receive. This feature enables you to let Mail know that you do not want to receive a particular type of e-mail. To use this feature, select an e-mail and click the Junk button.

Next, you can see the message redirection options. These allow you to reply to a single person or reply to a group of people if you have received an e-mail that contains multiple contacts. You can also see a Forward button, which allows you to send an e-mail you’ve received to people who weren’t among that e-mail’s original recipients.

Moving further to the right along the main menu, the Compose New Mail button allows you to create a new e-mail message for your intended recipients.

Next, you see the Note and To Do buttons. The Note button allows you to jot down notes about anything, not just e-mail.

You can keep the notes on your e-mail server for safe retrieval later. In a similar vein, the To Do button lets you create iCal–like reminders to perform certain tasks in response to receiving e-mails that contain activity requests.

Sitting immediately to the right of the To Do button is the Related Messages button, which allows you to group messages that correspond to the same e-mail dialog.

This feature will organize and sequence the messages you have sent and received in a particular e-mail discussion. This feature will display these messages all at once, so you can see the flow of dialog between yourself and the other respondent/s.

The Mail Flag button enables you to highlight and prioritize the messages in your inbox based on their importance and significance.

This a great feature to use when you need to filter and organize the messages you deem more important than others.

Finally, you can see a Search box at the far right of Mail’s main menu bar. This box lets you search your e-mail by content, subject, title, recipient, and date.

Other Noteworthy Mail Items

The Mail app includes a few other features worth highlighting. The first is a window pane that includes Reminders and Mailboxes sections. This pane also includes a Notes and Folders menu bar that allows you to drill down into your notes, as well as access the folders associated with your e-mail account (see Figure 9–2).

Figure 9–2. Mail’s Notes and Folders menu bar

Activity Section

This same window pane includes an Activity section that allows you to view e-mail activity in real-time (see Figure 9–3). Watching this section as you send or receive e-mails can give you a better view of the e-mail activity occurring on your system. This section also includes a bar that shows time elapsed. This feature allows you to see whether a message was sent or whether a message you were trying to send reached its destination.

Figure 9–3. Mail’s Activity section

Listing and Content Windows

A listing of your e-mail and its content will be shown in Mail’s Listing and Content windows, respectively. The Listing pane displays your e-mails, while the Content pane displays the contents of the message you have currently selected in the Listing window (see Figure 9–4). Panes can be rearranged, but I recommend you leave them in their default positions for the sake of clarity.

Figure 9–4. Mail’s Listing (center pane) and Content (right pane) areas

Mail’s default layout is standard for most e-mail clients, and it provides a very easy way to view many e-mails at once.

E-mail Contextual Menus

Mail also includes a Mailbox menu in the menu at the top of its interface. You can use this menu to interact with the program in additional ways (see Figure 9–5). For example, this menu allows you to do several things related to managing and connecting to your e-mail account, such as create what are known as Smart Mailbox folders.

Figure 9–5. Mail’s Mailbox menu

Smart Mailbox

Smart Mailbox folders differ from other mailbox folders in that they are not actual folders that take up physical space on your hard drive; rather, they are virtual folders that use rules to fill and sort their content. Upon creating a Smart Mailbox, you are asked to supply the filter that will be used to designate the exact content that will fill the folder (see Figure 9–6). This content is not copied to the folder; rather, it is merely displayed in the folder, giving you the illusion that you have a folder dedicated to holding information in the manner you have specified. The benefit of such folders is that they do not take up extra space on your hard drive or the e-mail server you use for your e-mail. Also, you can create as many Smart Mailbox folders as you need. This feature provides the one of the best ways to keep your e-mails organized.

Figure 9–6. Smart Mailbox folders

Composing a Message

When composing a new mail message, you can use the message option buttons located in the upper right of the New Message window to manipulate the content of your message in several ways (see Figure 9–7).

Figure 9–7. Mail’s message option buttons

This section contains four option buttons: Attachments, Fonts, Photo Browser, and Stationery. In the upcoming sections, we’ll look at both their functionality and what they can do for you.

Attachments

Clicking the Attachments button allows you to insert file attachments of almost any type into your e-mail.

You can use this feature to send an accompanying file with your message to the intended recipient. You can also check an option to ensure that the attachment is formatted properly when going to someone using a Windows operating system (see Figure 9–8).

Figure 9–8. Mail’s Attachments window

Fonts

Clicking the Fonts button brings up a formatting toolbar that lets you edit the font properties of your message’s text.

With this feature, you can create messages that use different fonts, font sizes, and other custom font attributes, much as you would in a word processor such as Pages (see Figure 9–9).

Figure 9–9. Mail’s formatting toolbar for fonts

Photo Browser

Clicking the Photo Browser button allows you to incorporate images from iPhoto.

Clicking this button takes you directly into iPhoto, so that you can import pictures straight into your e-mail (see Figure 9–10).

Figure 9–10. Mail’s Photo Browser feature

Stationery

The final, right-most button at the top of all new messages is the Stationery button.

This button brings up interactive templates that you can use to spruce up your otherwise dull e-mails. Figure 9–11 shows a detailed view of the Stationery menu.

Figure 9–11. Mail’s Stationery menu

After you select your desired Stationery template, Mail automatically applies that template to the body of your e-mail. At this point, you can proceed to replace the default images and text supplied by the template with images and text of your own (see Figure 9–12).

Figure 9–12. Applying a Stationery template

Other Communication App Alternatives

Applications, like operating systems, are about choice. And the breadth of applications available for Lion OS X—and the way they enable you to go beyond the default functionality provided by the operating system—is one of the things that make Lion so great.

Application flexibility is more than just a good thing to have—it is an absolute necessity in today’s modern computing and technology environments. This is especially true where communication is concerned. Being aware of other ways to communicate on the Lion OS can save you time and grief in those cases where the application you are used to using just will not suffice. In this section, we’ll take a look at some alternative communication applications, exploring how these apps can help you stay in touch with your family, friends, and co-workers.

iChat

iChat gives you yet another way to communicate with other Mac users (see Figure 9–13).

iChat has several nice features and one significant drawback. iChat’s drawback: Both you and the person you’re chatting with must connect to a Jabber communication server. One the plus side, it supports Yahoo, AOL, and MSN Messenger buddy lists and communications. Another plus is that it’s available at no cost to Mac users.

Figure 9–13. iChat’s interface

FaceTime

FaceTime is Apple’s premier native communications application. It provides a private, secure connection for communicating with anyone else who owns any other type of Apple FaceTime–compatible computing device, including the iPad, the iPhone, and (of course!) any Mac computer. Figure 9–14 shows the FaceTime interface running on the iPhone.

Figure 9–14. FaceTime’s iPhone interface

FaceTime does not require you to connect to any type of server manually, and you can use it to interact with anyone already in your address book. Another plus: FaceTime has no learning curve, which makes it the easiest of the available communications applications to use.

Before you can use FaceTime to chat with someone, you need to enter that person’s phone number or e-mail address, and then request that this person add you as a contact. At that point, initiating a FaceTime chat is extraordinarily simple. Simply select the person you wish to chat with and click the FaceTime button. That’s all there is to it (see Figure 9–15).

FaceTime represents a revolutionary step forward in how we communicate using handheld and other computing devices. It is exclusively available to Mac users from the App Store for $0.99.

Figure 9–15. FaceTime on your Mac

Skype

Skype is a user-friendly video, audio, and chat program that provides another great way to communicate with others. It has a ton of features and is extremely easy to use.

Skype is also a phone utility that serves both home and business users. The program lets you make and receive phone calls through your computer. And unlike FaceTime, Skype lets you do much more than call other Skype users. In fact, it lets you call any phone in the world, anywhere in the world.

Skype is available on a broad range of platforms, including the Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems. It is also available on most mobile computing devices, including the iPhone (see Figure 9–16).

Figure 9–16. Skype on your iPhone

Skype is a very flexible application; it rivals FaceTime in functionality, yet exceeds it in accessibility. It is one application you should look into using if you want a way to transparently communicate with the rest of the world. Skype can be downloaded and installed from www.skype.com.

Summary

You Mac can serve as your communications gateway to the rest of the world. It has a wealth of applications that enable you to communicate with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Most of these applications are very cheap or free to use. They are also very popular, which means that you will find it easy to use them to contact others.

I recommend that you give all of the applications mentioned in this chapter a try, so you can see which one fits your communication needs best. In any case, the Lion OS offers you powerful tools that give you a way to talk to—and see—just about anyone else in the world. But this power also comes with significant responsibility. Remember to stay vigilant, and be sure to keep track of others who have your contact information. You should also remember to be tactful when you communicate with others over the Internet. You never know who is watching, and it is a good idea to be on your best behavior when your actions are potentially visible to the rest of the world.