Mac OS X

Mail Screen

Mail

It’s three applications that work as one: Mail, iCal and Address Book bring the power of Mac OS X to your email, calendar and contacts. You get elegant, easy-to-use interfaces, lightning-fast searches and complete integration across the applications and your Mac.

Icons

Mail: All your email accounts in
one place.

Designed from the ground up specifically for email, Mail offers an elegant user interface that makes it easy to manage all your email from a single, ad-free inbox, even when you’re not connected to the Internet. It works with most email standards — including POP3 and IMAP — and most popular email services, such as Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail,¹ and AOL Mail. If you have more than one email account, no problem. Just add all your accounts to Mail and you’ll be able to access everything from one central place.

Exchange Server Support

Coming in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in Mail, Address Book and iCal. Learn more

Message

Data, detected.

Mail does more than just show email. It also analyses the contents to help you act on them. Say you get an email inviting you to dinner at Gino’s Pizza tomorrow at 6 p.m. Mail not only recognises that 6 p.m. is the time, it knows that “tomorrow” represents a date on a calendar. So you can add the invitation to your iCal calendar by clicking the date, whether it’s an actual date (October 18th) or a relative date (tomorrow). And if the message includes a phone number or email address, you can add it to Address Book with just a click.

Filtering the junk.

mail / add info to address book

Mail includes an intelligent mail filter that automatically catches messages it thinks are junk. Junk mail is placed in a special folder in Mail so it doesn’t clog up your inbox. If a junk message gets through, simply click the Junk button and from then on, similar email will be placed in the Junk folder. The more you train Mail to recognise junk mail, the better it gets.

Address Book: One place for all your contacts.

contact info

Address Book gives you a flexible and convenient place to store contact information for your family, friends and colleagues. You can import information from other applications, create distribution lists for clubs and groups, print address labels and envelopes and more. Because Address Book is built on the industry-standard vCard format for storing contact information, your friends can send you cards that you can add to your own list by dropping them in — no typing required.

More than a great view.

Address Book does more than display card contents; it also lets you use them. Click a home page URL to open the website. Click an email address to instantly send a message or start an iChat conversation.

Google Maps

iCal: A powerful desktop calendar.

iCal calendar

iCal makes it easy to keep track of your busy schedule. You can create as many separate calendars as you need — one for home, another for school, a third for work and so on. You can see all your calendars in a single window or choose to see only the calendars you want.

RSVP you.

With iCal, you can invite friends and family to events. iCal lets you create invitations using contact information from your Address Book, update your guest list, keep track of attendee responses and receive the latest status information. A centralised notification box keeps all your invitations and responses in one easy-to-access location so you can manage events in iCal instead of your busy email inbox. And when you or another Mac user receives an iCal invitation in Mail, it’s automatically added to iCal for you.

Spotlight

Find what
you need.

Thanks to Spotlight, it’s easy to find information in Mail, iCal and Address Book. Within the applications, a search sorts through everything — all fields in an email, all information on a card or appointment — so you find every possible match. If you’re not using the applications, you can still find messages, contacts and appointments by using Spotlight search in the menu bar. Start typing a search term and Spotlight returns the related items immediately.

Smart Mailbox

Smart Groups and Smart Mailboxes.

Spotlight technology helps you organise your mail and contacts in another big way: Smart Groups and Smart Mailboxes. You simply select the relevant criteria — say, every contact with a birthday in the next 30 days or every email sent by your boss — and your applications create a folder containing every item that meets your criteria. Best of all, the folders stay updated as new items are created. Smart Groups in Address Book appear in your Group list and Smart Mailboxes in Mail appear just below your inboxes.

Fully integrated.

Because they’re Mac OS X applications, Mail, iCal and Address Book are fully integrated with each other and with other features of your Mac. For example, Mail and iCal use the contacts in your Address Book, so you can quickly send messages or invitations to individuals and groups. Mail can access your iPhoto library, so it’s easy to email pictures to your friends and family. If you receive an attachment, Mail lets you use Quick Look to view its contents without saving the attachment and opening another application.

Mail Growth Window Spotlight

Syncing included.

Part of what makes Address Book and iCal so powerful is seamless syncing. They can sync the contact and calendar information on your Mac with your iPhone or other mobile phone, PDA or iPod touch, so it follows you everywhere. And with a MobileMe account,² your contacts and calendars stay up to date across multiple Mac computers and on the web, so you can access your information from any computer with an Internet connection.

  1. Yahoo! Mail Plus account required; fees may apply.
  2. MobileMe is available to persons age 13 and older. Annual subscription fee and Internet access required. Terms of service apply.