April 17, 2007
Mail | Turn off web bugs
Did you know your email is bugged?
Email marketing messages typically include web bugs, which are normally small, invisible images with a tracking number in the file name. They are typically used to track when, and how often you view each message.
This isn't really a big deal, except that spammers also use web bugs. Thus, when you view a spam message - often simply by selecting it so that you can mark it as junk - you send a signal back to the sender as if to say, "Thank you very much for the spam. Please send more!" And that's probably not a signal you want to send.
How to turn off web bugs
- Open mail > Preferences > Viewing, and uncheck the box beside "Display remote images in HTML messages"
- Close the Preferences window.
Email messages with images will now display a "Load Images" button - for the one's you do want to view.
Find out more about web bugs on Wikipedia.
Posted by Brad at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2007
Mail | Paste and match style
For Meghan,
Have you ever copied styled text from a web page, and found it was all wrong when you pasted it into an email message?
I used to go through this all the time. Either the text is gigantic, or the line spacing is weird, or it becomes invisible because it's white text on a white page. Or I try to copy text from an email message I recieved, and when I paste it into a new message, it's blue. I don't want blue.
To try to fix it, I'd open Mail's text formatting palettes and start changing the colour and size. Which kind of works. But the line spacing issue ends up being impossible to get rid of and infects the whole email message. It would never end well. But now...
There's a simple solution:
- Copy the styled text from a web page - try the lovely turquoise text above.
- Place the cursor in your message where you want it to appear.
- Select, "Paste and Match Style" from the Mail.app's Edit menu.
The keyboard shortcut for "Paste and Match Style" is ALT+SHIFT+APPLE+v.
You may want to use 2 hands. Actually, if you can pull off this manueuver using only one hand, you should get a prize.
This tip also applies to TextEdit and iChat.
Posted by Brad at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2006
Mail | Auto-complete words
If you press the ESC key while typing in most OS X applications, a small window will pop up showing you a list of possible words for auto-completion. You can then double-click the word you want to type. Or you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through the list, and hit the RETURN key to choose the word you want.
This is a handy option if you're trying to type a longer word which you aren't exactly sure how to spell. You can type the start of the word, and then auto-complete the rest.
I put this in the Mail.app category because that's where I do most of my writing. I expect Mom would probably do most of her writing in Mail as well. It also works in TextEdit.app. However, it only works in applications written specifically for OS X. Thus, like system-wide spell check, it won't work in Microsoft Word, which is really an OS 9 application adapted to work in OS X.
UPDATE:
After trying to use auto-completion for a while, I see that it's quite buggy. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
I've learned several ways to get it working again, or partially working again, but unless it works 100% of the time, it's not worth bothering with.
I'll post a note when it becomes dependable.
Posted by Brad at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2005
Mail | Spell check
Rather than having and maintaining a separate spell checker for every application, OS X includes a system-wide spell checker which is shared by all applications. So rather than having to teach your text editor how to spell "email" and then having to teach your email application how to spell "email," a single correction will affect the spelling in all your applications. Which is nice...
You probably most use OS X's spell checker in Mail, so we'll use that as an example.
To access the system-wide spell checker in Mail:
From the EDIT menu, select SPELLING, and then SPELLING...
This will open a window that looks like this:
First, if you look at the drop down menu under "Dictionary," you'll notice that the Americans have appropriated the English language, so you'll want to change it to the appropriate regional variation on 'standard' English - "British English!" Set it to "British English" and it will always use the British dictionary. Now you can type "colour" and the spell checker won't tell you it's spelt wrong. I have mine set to Canadian English, in a vain attempt to maintain my cultural heritage while in exile.
In the illustration above, I had the word "email" highlighted in my message when I selected "Spelling..."
Then I clicked the "Learn" button to teach the dictionary the word "email" (which it obviously didn't know).
I'll assume you can figure out what the rest of the buttons do.
Posted by Brad at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
Mail | Drag and drop attachments via the Dock
If you want to send someone an image by email, you can drag the image file down to the Mail icon in the Dock.
1. In the Finder, navigate to the folder containing the image file.
2. Drag the image file to the Mail icon in the Dock (the strip of icons across the bottom of your screen).
As a result
Mail will move to the foreground, and a new message window will open with the image file already attached to it. All you have to do is address it.
For me, it's by far the simplest, fastest, best way of doing attachments. I avoid having to navigate through folders ala the Attach button.
If you want to send a bunch of files, you can select them all and drag the bunch of them to the Mail icon in the Dock.
Alternatively, if you already have a new email message window open, you can drag the file you want to attach directly into the message.
Posted by Brad at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
