How to Add or Remove Background Color of Email Messages in Your Message List in Apple Mail
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How to Add or Remove Background Color of Email Messages in Your Message List in Apple Mail

Here’s how to add and at least as importantly how to remove the background color of email messages in your message list in Apple Mail on your Mac. Let’s say that you want to color code the messages in your inbox or other mailbox on your Mac in Apple Mail, maybe red for email from your boss, yellow for aunt Sally, and green for your kid who’s away at college and always asking for money. Here’s how to do it, and how to undo it.

how to search mac mail rules on Apple Macs
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How to Search Mail Rules on a Mac

If you’re wondering why you can’t figure out how to search mail rules on your Mac, it’s because Apple has not included a way to search your email rules for the Mac Mail app. Stupid, right? You would think that with all the other things that Apple gets right, something as basic and obvious as a way to search mail rules would be a no-brainer. Anyways, if you need to search your mail rules, here’s how to do it.

how to customize the reply toolbar in mac mail app
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How to Customize the Toolbar in a Reply Email in Apple Mac Mail

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.

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Mac Mail Search Not Working on Monterey, Big Sur, or Catalina? Do This

If your Mac mail search is not working in Catalina, Monterey, or Big Sur (or really any other version), read on! Sometimes it’s the most obvious, and simplest, thing that you do last. In 2021 (and now 2022) there were tons of articles and posts answering questions about how to fix email search on a Mac, and many of them suggest complicated (and yes, sometimes necessary) methods for restoring the search function for your Mac email, everything from reindexing Spotlight to reinstalling the OS (eek!). So if email search is not working on your Mac, we’re here to hopefully save you some frustration.

How to Deselect All or Multiple Emails in the Mac Mail App
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How to DESELECT All Email Messages in the Mac Mail App

Don’t you just hate it when you accidentally hit Command-A (⌘-A) and end up selecting all of the email messages in the mailbox or folder you are currently in? Of course, ordinarily you can just hit ‘escape’, or even hit ⌘-A again, and it will deselect them all. But for at least some people running Mac OS 11.6 Big Sur (and maybe others), does that work? Nooooo! And with apologies to Steve Martin, excuuuuuuuse us!!! Why the heck not? Here’s how to deselect all email messages if you have accidentally selected them all.

dockstar alternative
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Missing Dockstar? Get Dock Icon Mailbox Badges with This Dockstar Alternative!

If you are looking for a Dockstar replacement to give you multiple mailbox or folder notification badges on your Mail dock icon, or if you wondering how to have multiple email notifications badges on your Mac Mail dock icon, you’re going to love this Dockstar substitute!

how to delete all inbox email icloud
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How to Bulk Purge or Mass Delete iCloud Email – Also How to Empty the iCloud Trash Folder

Here’s how to bulk delete email on iCloud, and also how to empty the iCloud Trash Folder. Let’s say that you want to delete many or all emails in your iCloud inbox or other mail folder in your Apple email account (i.e. your icloud.com, mac.com, or me.com email address account). Further, let’s say that you have accumulated thousands of emails in there, and you want to purge them all at once – to bulk delete them. Here’s how to do that.

activity monitor apple mail
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Whatever Happened to Activity Monitor in Apple Mail? And How to Get it Back

Are you trying to find where is the Mail activity monitor on your Mac? If you are something of a geek, you probably really appreciated that the Apple mail app on your Mac allowed you to monitor every time an activity fired up in mail via a little monitor at the lower left of your Mail.app window. Here’s how to get it back.

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How to Get Mac Mail to Show Threaded Conversations and How to Turn on Threaded Conversations Only for Selected Mailboxes

You know that the Mac Mail app can organize your email into threaded conversations, but how to actually get it to do that – how to set the conversation view in Mac Mail – is weirdly not obvious. However the reason that it’s not obvious how to turn on threaded conversations in Mac Mail actually relates to a nifty aspect of the threaded view feature. Read on!

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Can’t Download Gmail after an OS Update or Upgrade? This May be the Problem

Lots of people put off updating or upgrading their operating system (OS) because every update or upgrade to an OS seems to come with a raft of problems and issues. Whether you use a Mac or a Windows machine, an update or upgrade can cause problems with retrieving email in general, and Gmail in particular. In the Mac world these come from updates to OS X (now on version 10.13, known as High Sierra). If you are using Windows, the current version is Windows 10.

How to Add Emoji to Your Mac Mail Folders for Quick Visual Identification How to Add Emoji to Your Mac Mail Folders for Quick Visual Identification how to add emoji to your mac mail folders for quick visiual identification
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You Can’t Change the Color of Mailbox Folders in Mac Mail but You CAN Add Emoji as Icons to the Mailbox Names!

Lots of people want to change the color of individual mailbox folders on their Mac in the Mail app, in order to quickly and visually distinguish one mail folder from another. Despite dozens, if not hundreds, of threads looking for this option on the Mac forums, it has never been added as a feature. But there is a way that you can do something just as good – in fact we think better! – to visually distinguish mailbox folders in your Mac mail app program! You can use emoji as icons in your mailbox names!

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How to Easily Forward Email with Full Headers from Within Mac Mail

If you have a Mac, and on occasion want to forward an email including all of the headers (such as, say, when reporting spam), you may have noticed that starting with a few iterations of OS X back, you could no longer easily populate a forwarding or replying email with the full headers of said email.

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How to See and Access the Contents of a Winmail.dat File on Your Mac

Wondering ‘What is a Winmail.dat file attachment and how do I open it?” If you have a Mac computer, such as a Macbook, Macbook Pro, or Macbook Air, and if you have any friends or colleagues who still use Windows in general, and Outlook in particular, then you are almost certainly familiar with the issue of your friend or colleague sending you an attachment in email (say, a document), but all you receive in your Mac email is that damned Winmail.dat file. Here’s how to open a Winmail.dat file on a Mac, and get at the contents.

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How to Export Email Addresses from Your Email Program on a Mac

There are any number of reasons that you may want to know how to export email addresses from your email program on your Mac. Whether using Apple mail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or some other program, here is how to extract the email addresses of your contacts and correspondents from your mailing program on your Mac – just make sure that you are doing it for the right reasons.

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Using Public Wifi and Your Mail App Can’t Connect to Gmail? This May be Why

If you find yourself using public wifi, such as in a coffee shop or such, and suddenly you find that your email program can’t access and download or send email from Gmail, and if you are using a proxy, VPN, or other “wifi connection securing” program, that may be the problem. (From hereon out we will simply say “VPN services” as that is usually what someone would be using.)