Nearly everyone knows how to customize the tool bar for the Mac Mail app – that is, they know how to customize the primary email tool bar on their Macbook or Mac. But when you are editing a reply email, the tool bar for that reply email is different than the primary tool bar. Here’s how to customize the reply toolbar in Mac Mail app. This information is current as of Big Sur; YMMV (your milage may vary) with other versions.
Now maybe you already discovered how to customize the reply toolbar in Mac Mail (in which case why are you reading this? :~) ), but it’s likely that you haven’t, and now you are trying to figure out how to do what, as a seemingly simple thing, should be obvious. And that’s the thing, like so many other things on a Mac, it is simple, and easy, but it’s not obvious how to do it! Here’s how.
How to Customize the Reply Toolbar in Mac Mail
Before we tell you how to do this, let’s make sure that we are all talking about the same thing. Here is a real example of a reply email, meaning we received an email in Mac Mail, and now we have clicked on ‘reply’, and this is an image from that draft reply. As you can see, the ‘send’ icon in a reply email in Mac Mail is a paper airplane. By default that ‘send’ icon is to the far left of the reply email tool bar (at least it was for us, in Big Sur).
Now, if you are already familiar with customizing your primary email toolbar you may have already looked under the ‘View’ menu, where you clicked on ‘Customize Toolbar…’ to customize your main toolbar. And so you may have looked for an option to ‘Customize Reply Toolbar’, and of course you couldn’t find one. That’s because there is not a separate option for customizing your reply toolbar. The trick is that you need to be in a draft reply message, and then invoke the ‘View’ > ‘Customize Toolbar…’ option again!
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In our example we really want the paper airplane ‘send’ icon over on the right, next to the ‘reply/reply all’ icon (makes sense, right?) So to accomplish this, while we are in an active reply draft, we click on “View” at the very top menu (just like you would to customize the primary tool bar), and then click on ‘Customize Toolbar…’ (ditto).
And whaddaya know!
Now the tool bar options are specific to the reply message! Just move your icons where you want them, and hit ‘Done’.
Voila!
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and we don't subject you to ads or annoying video pop-ups. But it does cost us out of our pocket to keep the site going (going on 20 years now!) So your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated!
Receipts will come from ISIPP.