Category Archives: Mail
change Flag names in Mail
‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Yellow’ aren’t particularly meaningful ways to categorise messages, but changing the names to something more useful can make the ‘Flags’ feature a handy tool.
The procedure is quite simple, but the first thing you have to do is actually flag a couple of messages:
1. Flag some messages (one of each colour if you want seven categories):
2. Next, go into the sidebar in Mail. Click the little disclosure triangle:
3. Click on one of the names and press ‘return’ on the keyboard:
4. Type in a new name and press ‘return’ again:
5. Of course, you can change the flag names at any time:
how to restore Bounce in Mail
If you were a fan of the ‘bounce’ feature in the previous version of Mail, you may be disappointed that it has been removed in Mail Version 5.x
If you want the feature badly enough, you can either
1. Use this add-on for Mail.app in Lion
Restore Bounce Mail Button To Lion’s Mail
or
2. Use Mozilla’s Thunderbird.app instead of Mail, and get the ‘Mail Redirect‘ add on.
Mail won’t remember passwords
Sometimes, Mail keeps asking you for a password that you know it already has. It asks if you want it to remember the password in the keychain, and you say Yes! And still, you keep getting those password requests…
If you look in Mail > Preferences… > Account Information, you may be surprised to find the password field blank. You may be even more surprised that when you enter it, click out of the tab and hit ‘Save’, the field is blank again the next time you look!
There are a couple of different solutions to this problem, and both revolve around the keychain. One solution is to try a keychain repair. If the repair indicates nothing is wrong, then you have a problem with the access controls. Let’s deal with each in the order you should do them.
Verify and Repair Keychain
1. Go to Applications > Utilities > Keychain.app and double-click to open it.
2. From the menubar, choose Keychain Access > Keychain First Aid
3. Type in your admin password in the field, and click Start to verify the keychain. If the keychain needs repairing, click the radio button for repair and click Start again. Run the ‘Verify’ task one more time.
Repair Access controls
If the above didn’t solve your problem, or the keychain verify/repair task indicated no problems, then you’re going to need to look at the access controls on each Mail keychain.
4. In the left-hand pane, click login in the top panel, and Passwords in the bottom panel.
5. Look for your Mail/imap keychains. Click on one of them, and then press command-i on your keyboard, or click the little ‘i‘ at the bottom of the Keychain window.
6. Click the Access Control tab in the window that pops up. Click ‘Confirm before allowing access’, and make sure Mail is in the list of apps in the window underneath that is always allowed access. Go and do the same for any other Mail/imap keychains in the window, and your problem should be fixed.
7. If the settings above were already configured correctly or they do not resolve the problem, click on the Attributes tab (next to the Access Control tab).
8. Click on the ‘Show password’ box. If everything is OK, you should get a request to put in your admin password. Chances are, though, if you’ve got to this stage you will instead get a message saying ‘Access is restricted’ and no option to do anything about it.
9. If you don’t get asked for the password, close the information box (red radio button, top-left), and control-click on your mail/imap keychain in the Keychain window. Choose ‘Delete <name of keychain)'. Do the same for any other keychain's exhibiting the same problem.
10. You can now go back to Mail, and enter your password in the Account preferences box.
Problem solved! 🙂
Mail: back to classic
OK, I gave it three days, but in the end I just can’t get along with Mail’s new look; it’s just too visually confusing for me. The good news is Apple didn’t desert its old users entirely. If you want to return Mail to its former glory, just go to Mail Preferences > Viewing and check the box at the top. That’s it, back to clarity! 🙂
Mail Preferences: