Oct 14, 2015 - Mail is great when it works, but if you've been having problems with your. Turn Wi-Fi off before launching Mail, disconnect your Mac from the. If Gmail works fine on a different network or machine, contact your network administrator. Tell them to try advanced tests to diagnose connectivity issues. If the issue affects multiple users and different networks, check the G Suite Status Dashboard for any known issues affecting Gmail.
As of the Mountain Lion version, Apple’s Mail is better than ever at helping you manage your email. And Google’s Web-based Gmail is also pretty good—but how do you combine the two in just the right way so as to get the best of both? The answer is simple—follow my guide below, wherein I describe my favorite way to balance a few features and compromises to make Mail and OS X work best with the Gmail Way. Step 1: Enable IMAP The first step to getting OS X’s Mail to work well with Gmail is to enable. This will not only let Mail check your Gmail messages, but also keep everything in sync between your devices and the Web.
In a desktop Web browser, and click the gear icon on the right of the page, just below your Google Account avatar. In the menu that appears, choose Settings. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. About halfway down the page in the IMAP Access section, select Enable IMAP.
Click Save at the bottom of the page. Enable IMAP so you'll be able to see mail across all your devices. Step 2: Tweak labels in Gmail When you use Gmail on the Web, you can take advantage of a few unique features that traditional email clients like Mail don’t support. The biggest example: Gmail labels. Instead of filing messages into single folders, as Mail and most other clients do, Gmail lets you tag email messages with multiple words, or labels, just as you can with photos on Flickr.
A few tweaks to Gmail's Labels settings will help messages appear correctly on your different devices. To ensure a smooth multidevice ride, stay in Gmail’s settings and click the Labels tab.
Here, you make labels invisible to apps that can’t deal with them, such as Mail on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Two such labels are “Chats” and “Important,” so in the Labels tab, ensure that the Show in IMAP checkbox is disabled for them. However, unlike previous advice, make sure All Mail is enabled. One note: With All Mail enabled, Mail will keep multiple copies of your labeled messages. Mail now hides the copies, so you won’t be bothered by them, but the copies do take up disk space. It’s a compromise, to be sure, made to adapt Mail to the way Gmail works. But I think the compromise is worthwhile.
Step 3: Add your Google account to OS X Before OS X Lion, when you wanted to add your Gmail account, you’d do so in the Mail app by selecting Mail Preferences Accounts. You can still do that if you want, but OS X now understands more about your Google Account—that it includes not only Gmail but also other services.
So I recommend instead opening System Preferences and selecting Mail, Contacts, & Calendars. (Yep, this deja vu is brought to you by iOS.) Use System Preferences to add your Google account information to OS X. To add your Google Account here, click the plus button in the lower left, then click Gmail in the list of new account options on the right. Whether you’re using a regular @gmail account or Google Apps to run your Gmail through your domain (so your address looks like [email protected]), add your name, email address, and password on the sheet that appears, and click Set Up.
OS X will check with Google’s servers and then display a sheet offering all the apps you can use with your Google account. As of this writing, those include email, calendar, Messages (via the Google Talk services), and Notes.
All will be checked by default, so feel free to disable any you don’t want. If you do want to use some of your other Google Account services in OS X, though, this is a great way to make the magic happen. When you add your Google account to this System Preferences pane, you can access all your other Google services, too. Step 4: Set up Mail Apple has made some strides when it comes to making Mail behave better with Gmail, but this working relationship still has a few catches. Deal with archiving issues: One of Gmail’s perks is a ridiculous amount of storage space, so Google has set it up to highly encourage archiving your email instead of having to make the decision to delete just some of it. After all, you never know if that rainy day will come next month or four years from now, and there’s no harm in keeping tiny emails around in this age of ever-expanding storage space. Mail's new Archive button.
As of OS X 10.7 and 10.8, you might notice a new Message Archive option in Mail’s menu. You can also use View Customize Toolbar to add an Archive button to the toolbars of Mail’s main window and individual message viewer windows. Unfortunately, after two years and a number of bug reports filed with Apple, that button still doesn’t work properly with Gmail.
Press the button, and it will create a new top-level folder called Archive where you can now store messages that you don’t need in your Inbox, but that you want to be able to search later. This does not follow Gmail’s behavior on the Web of moving messages to All Mail, which means that messages archived through Mail won’t be stored in the place Gmail understands. If you rarely sign into Gmail on the Web, you don't need to worry about this.
But if you do—say, while on vacation away from your devices or using a different work computer—some of Gmail’s built-in archive and search features won’t know to look in the Archive folder that Mail created. Since you can’t fix Mail’s archive behavior with Gmail accounts, and you can’t tell Gmail to archive in a different folder, I propose a compromise. In Gmail’s settings, under the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, change the setting When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted to Auto-Expunge off. Then, just below that option, change the setting When a message is marked as deleted and expunged to Archive the message. Click Save at the bottom of the page. Once you tweak settings in Mail in a later step, using the Delete key on a message will tell Gmail to archive it in All Mail. If you truly want to delete a message, you can drag and drop it to the Gmail/Trash folder.
Tweak your labels: In the past, if you applied multiple Gmail labels to a message in your inbox, then searched for that message in Mail, you’d be flooded with duplicate messages—one for each label, another for its appearance in the inbox, and another for its All Mail entry. But happily those days are over. Now, Mail is smart enough to map Gmail labels to different folders. For example, if you’re on an email list for a hobby or your kid’s sports team, you can apply a Gmail label for “T-ball” as well as a second label of “Follow Up” for messages that you can’t deal with right this moment. The message will appear with both labels on the Web, or in two different folders—T-ball and Follow Up—in Mail. (Tip: to use multiple labels, or folders, in Mail, right-click a message and choose Copy To instead of Move To).
Better yet, when you search in Mail, it will show one single message from All Mail (not all the copies in different folders), unless you use the search tools that appear just below the toolbar to focus your search in a specific folder. Once you open Mail, the new Google Account that you added to System Preferences should spring into action and download your inbox and labels/folders. To make everything work as well as possible, I recommend going to Mail Preferences Accounts and adjusting a few settings. Click your new Google Account in Mail’s preferences, then click the Mailbox Behaviors tab. To keep this simple, uncheck everything so that Store draft messages on the server is the only thing enabled.
Close the Preferences window, which will ask you to save your changes. Click Save; now you’re almost done! Tell Mail which Gmail folder to use for your drafts. To ensure that you can draft messages across devices, the last thing to do is tell Mail which Gmail folder to use for your drafts. In Mail’s main folder list on the left, find your Gmail account and click the arrow next to the top-most folder in it, called “Gmail” (yes, with the brackets). Click its subfolder called “Drafts,” then go to the menu bar and choose Mailbox Use This Mailbox For Drafts. The folder will disappear from under the Gmail folder in your sidebar and move up to the main “Drafts” heading at the very top of all your folders and accounts in the sidebar, under the heading “Mailboxes.” This way, Mail will save your drafts in the proper place it understands, but the drafts will also be properly synced with Gmail and your other devices.
Now you’re ready to Gmail. There you have it. Google made some changes in the past couple of years, and so did Apple. It still takes some finagling, but it’s now a little easier to get Gmail, and the rest of your Google Account, to work well with Mail and OS X.
How does Apple get some really simple things so wrong? It astounds me. I would have thought highlighting text in ANY text based application—such as Apple Mail—would be a no-brainer in OS X. Mail is at version 6.1 or 6.2, and there’s still no easy way to highlight text with a colour. Because most pure Mac applications share the basic Cocoa framework provided by OS X this issue of highlighting is something you’ll likely come across in many places. For instance, I am composing this post in MarsEdit. It also has no way to highlight text because it shares the same text editing engine as Mail, TextEdit, etc.
Without further delay, here is the solution. CORRECTION: Okay, I have just noticed the current version of TextEdit (v 1.8 (301)) on my OS X does support highlighting. Previous versions did not. I am not sure when that was added in, and I am also not sure why it hasn’t been added into the rest of the text apps such as Mail. Hopefully it will eventually. This will, at least, make it easier for us to define a custom style ourselves. It cuts out one step, which was to copy and paste highlighted text from another source (such as Microsoft Word or highlighted text from this article) in order to define a style with it.
How to add highlights to Mail 1. Open TextEdit. If you have version 1.8 (301) it should look like this: 2. Type something (anything) into TextEditor. Select what you have typed. Using the Highlighter button, add a highlight using the Highlight Color button as shown in the above image.
Now go to Format Font Styles (as shown in following image) 4. A Styles drop-down window will appear. Select “ Add To Favorites” button, as shown here: 5. Give it a name, and do not select the “include font” and “include ruler” options. You now have a new style for yellow highlighting. Let’s jump over to Apple Mail. Start a new message.
Write some text. Select the text you wish to add a colored highlight to. Bring up the context menu (Control-click, two-finger click). Select Font then Styles 7. The same drop-down Styles window (as the one you saw in TextEdit) will appear.
Select the style menu. It will likely say Default until you change it. Change it to Highlight Yellow (or whatever you called your new style). You now have highlighted text in Apple Mail. Why we have to go through all these steps to set up Mail the way it should have been designed in the first place, we might never know. Happy highlighting. Instructions for older OS X installations If you get to TextEdit and there is NOT a highlight button or option (as indicated in my instructions above) you need to do Step Two differently.
Copy any one of the following colored text examples, and paste it into TextEdit. Use each color to create the highlights you wish to save as a style. The rest of the instructions are the same. Yes, for some unknown reason Styles in the Format menu will be greyed out.
So you have to use the one in the Context Menu (the right-click menu). Yes, copying from another rich text editor should always work.
But as to why your newly created style does not work, I am not sure. Without seeing your computer myself I am not sure what I can suggest. Here is what I am understanding.
– You write some text – You highlight that text – You “right-click” and select FONT Styles – It will show the current style as Default – But you change that to your newly created Yellow Highlight (or whatever you called it) – Nothing happens. Does the Style previewer change to show what the Yellow Highlight style looks like? Does it look correct in the previewer?
What about the other styles? Do they show up as you would expect in the style previewer when you change the style? I’ve tried this with no luck. I’m running 10.7.5. I can successfully save the style in TextEdit and (using TextEdit) the style works beautifully.
If I open or create a new TextEdit document, I can select some text, right-click and then choose Fonts/Styles and choose the “highlight” option and it will apply the correct highlight style to the text. However, when I launch Apple Mail and select some text to apply the style to, the newly saved style is NOT in the options list of styles. I only see the default styles in the list. I even went so far as to copy and paste some highlighted text directly into an email in Mail and then right-clicked and went to Fonts/Styles and tried to save the new style directly in Mail. This method does allow me to save a new style for future use, but the highlight (background color) doesn’t work and is not displayed in the preview when selecting it. Any ideas why a saved style in TextEdit doesn’t appear for use in Mail?
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