Ask Jacob

The good news is that you can move the mail file over fairly easily. There is are two folders and a file you need to copy from your home folder. The home folder is in your hard drive in the “Users” folder and then in a folder with your unique user name. The home folder is indicated with a ” ~ ” symbol and I will use the symbol in describing the files locations.

First copy the preference file: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
Then grab the main mail folder ~/Library/Mail/
And lastly the Mail Downloads folder ~/Library/Mail Downloads/

On the fresh system copy these back to your new Users account, in there respective places. Then when you launch the new mail app it will look just like the old one.

- Jacob

The easiest way to do this would be to first drag the “.eml” attachment to your desktop. Then Right Click or [Control] Click on the attachment and select “Get Info.” Next expand the “Open with:” section and select the Mail.app application as the assigned program for that file type. Click on the [Change All...] button and click on [Continue]. Close the Info window and from now on you can just double click on any “.eml” attachment and it will open in Mail.app.

- Jacob

There are two ways to find the original email file on your system there is an easy way and a hard way. The hard way would be to first find an identifier in the email that will make it easy to find in Spotlight. An easy way to do that is to copy a large chunk of text from the body of the email. Then go to the Spotlight search next to the clock in your menu bar. Search for that text you have copied. Hopefully just one item will be returned in the results. Select “Show All” to get the search results into a separate window. Click once on the email item in the list and select “Get Info” from the File menu. Two pieces of info will be important to you. In the General section will be the “Where:” location of where all your email from that account is stored. Then in the Name & Extension section of the Info window will be the real name of the email, for instance 740892.emlx is the name of your email to me. You can then got to folder where your email is kept and find the message.

OK now the easy way; I had to put it at the end or nobody would read through the hard way. Find the email in Apple Mail and drag it to your desktop. A copy of the email message will be placed on your desktop so you can do with it as you please.

Hope that helps,

Jacob

There are two ways to handle the deleting of unwanted email within Apple Mail. You can move mail to a Trash folder until it is time to permanently remove the messages, or you can keep them in your Inbox until they are to be removed completely. Deleted messages will remain in the Trash until they are permanently erased, as specified in Mail preferences. If you want to empty the trash early, you can Right click or [Control] click on the trash icon and select “Erase Deleted Messages.”

In Mail preferences, under the Accounts tab, you can specify for each mail account to not “Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox” by un-checking the checkbox. Messages remain in their original location after you delete them, and are shown dimmed or are hidden. To show or hide deleted messages, select “Show Deleted Messages” or “Hide Deleted Messages” from the View menu.

You will probably want to select the “Hide Deleted Messages” options to get rid off those grayed out messages.

Hope that helps,

Jacob

As with most annoying things in the computer world, this is a feature and not a glitch. This was added to mail so that people could proofread what they were sending on their Apple computers. You can change the display option of your attachment by Right clicking or [control] clicking on the attachment and selecting “View as Icon” from the popup menu. To change it from displaying an icon, to displaying the image or PDF in the body of the email, Right click on it and select “View in Place.”

Hope that helps,
Jacob

The problem with the dimming screen could be caused by a few “features” of the Apple laptop design. The first possible cause would be the brightness keys being inadvertently pressed. On all the G4 PowerBooks and later laptops, Apple has included brightness keys as a sub-feature of the F1-F12 keys The icons for raising the brightness is a big sun image and to lower the brightness is a key with a little sun image. The function keys that these are associated with the icons vary from model to model. Depending on the settings your apple computer has, you may need to hold down the Function shift key [FN] to activate the special function of those Brightness keys. It is possible that when hitting a nearby key your finger is also connecting with the brightness keys. I reverse the special function of those keys In the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences to avoid those kind of accidental changes.

The second possibility you have already ruled out but it is often the problem for other users. For others the dimming could be due to Ambient Light sensors. Many newer Apple computers with built-in displays have sensors in them that detect when the room is dark. The computer can then dim the screen when the lights are lowered, so that the user’s eyes are not blinded by the screen. You can turn off this feature in the Display System Preferences. This feature is set by a checkbox, labeled “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes.”

The third culprit affects desktop Macs more than Apple laptops. Desktop Macs have a small battery to retain sound and brightness settings, among other things. A failing battery in a desktop could cause these settings to reset to defaults, perhaps a failing battery in you laptop or other power system problem could cause a similar effect. Try resetting the PMU and PRAM via these instructions and see if your settings are retained after restart. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1431

The issue with Apple Mail changing column listings is a bit trickier. I have personally experienced this problem but not as frequently as you have. It has yet to occur in OS X 10.5 Mail. This seems to be an issue with the 10.4 Apple Mail plist file, and the way it writes those column changes during operation. To my knowledge there is not a fix, other than moving to 10.5, but you can always try some general disk maintenance, like repair disk permissions, to see if that fixes it.

Hope that helps,
Jacob

If you are using Lotus Notes 6 or newer, then you can export those files as vCards. The Export option should be under the File menu. Once you have the vCards you just need to transfer them over to the Mac and select Import vCard from the File menu of the Mac Address Book application. Address Book will also import from a text file if that is your only export option within Lotus Notes. That option is in the same pop-out menu as the vCard import.

It sounds like you may have your Apple Mail window open too large. The green button on most Apple windows will toggle on and off the “fullscreen” mode for the window. Try clicking the green button on the top left hand part of the Mail window to see if you can reduce the window’s size. If, after clicking the green button, the window is still too large, you can manually resize the Mail window. Click and hold on the bottom right hand corner of the Apple Mail window and move the mouse pointer towards the Red button on the on the diagonal corner.

As you get closer the window will change size and the mail being viewed should also be resized to a readable length. Let go of the corner when it looks right to you.

Looking through Automator, I did not see a good way to export from Pages a MS document attached to an email. You could probably use an Applescript to achieve this but I am not a big user of Applescript, so that is not a definite yes.

Apple includes the built-in Automator function that will let you email a PDF of your document from the print screen. To access this feature, select “Print” from your File menu and then click on the PDF button. The drop-down menu will have a “Mail PDF” option. Select that option and Mail will open up a new document with that PDF attached.

Boy, those both sound like messy problems. Your problems in Apple Mail sound like a classic “Envelope Index” issues. The solution for that is to close mail and delete the Envelope Index file in your /Users/[your-user-account]/Library/Mail/ folder. Then restart mail and it should re-index from your saved mail.

The Microsoft office issue could be more difficult to deal with. When you removed Office did you use the official “Remove Office” application? It is located here: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Additional Tools/Remove Office/Remove Office.app and is the best way to remove an Office install. After you uninstall Office, make sure that you look through the /Users/[your-user-account]/Library/Preferences/ folder for left over Office settings that could also be corrupt. Then, once again, install office.

I believe that your friend’s issue is with the image attachment resize option in new versions of Apple Mail. Look at the bottom of the new message window. When an image is attached, the Message size is displayed on the left and a popup menu is on the right. This is the same for new and forwarded emails. From the popup menu you can select one of four options: Small, Medium, Large, and Actual Size. Selecting any of the first three options will change the image to an email-friendly size. Attachments over 2MB can be considered too large by some email applications.

I suspect that when your friend forwards these emails, that popup menu is set to “Small”. If he selects “Actual Size” from the menu, before he sends it, it will come through to the recipient just as he sees it on his computer.

I understand the trepidation in using that free email account from your ISP. I have changed ISPs dozens of times over the last decade and would have hated to change my email address each time. I have friends that I hear from only every other year and they should always be able to find me, regardless of what ISP I have. So yes a Yahoo or Google account would be a great choice for a permanent email address. I prefer a Google GMail account because they allow you free POP mail access. The POP mail feature lets you use the Apple Mail program to check and send email, so all the iLife applications should work well with Gmail. Go to www.gmail.com and get a Gmail account. Once you are logged into your gmail account click on Settings in the upper right corner. Then go to the Forwarding and POP tab and enable the POP mail for all your email. After that, you change the “When messages are accessed with POP” to “archive Gmail’s copy.” After that you never need to log into Gmail through a web browser. You will use Apple Mail to access your gmail account.

Google has a very helpful web page that can walk you through setting up Apple Mail to connect to Gmail.

mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13275

The problem you describe seems like a “Page Setup” problem. When the problem is only with one program and a variety of printer models, it is almost always a Page Setup issue. Under the File menu in Mail is Page Setup. When you select it you will see a standard Page Setup Window that looks the same in near every application. It is important that you make the changes to the Mail Page Setup because although they all look alike the settings are different for each application. The “Format for” should be set to “Any Printer,” “Paper Size” should be set to “US Letter,” and the “Orientation” should be set to the left most icon with the man standing straight. Scale is often set to 100% but can be less. Click OK after you make those changes and try to print. If the problem persists then something could have been changed with the US Letter settings. Go back to Page Setup and select “Manage Custom Sizes” from the Paper Size pull down Menu. In the Custom Paper Sizes window, click on the “+” button. That will make a new page setting. Set the width to 8.50 in and the height to 11.00 in and then double click on the untitled name of your custom page. Name it something you would remember. Now click OK and then select your new custom page from the Paper Size pull down menu. Click OK and then try printing again.

If both those suggestions do not work try downloading the latest print drivers for your printer. Good luck and I hope you are able to print this email.

Apple’s Mail application stores massive amounts of email-related data in a variety of resource databases. It remembers our sent and received email of course, but it also saves all the email addresses we have interacted with, sorting rules, and junk-mail rules. The more data it saves, the more likely an update is going to break old databases, especially if you save most of your old emails. I have emails from the ’90s in my computer at home.One Mail database that often gets damaged is the “Envelope Index.” This is a SQLite database that provides important information about your emails, but it is just a listing of information. If you delete it, a new database will be created based on the emails you have stored on your computer. You can find your “Envelope Index” in your home folder’s library folder (/Users/”YourUserAccountHere”/Library/Mail/Envelope Index). Quit Mail and then drag “Envelope Index” to the trash. Now just restart Mail. It will act like it is importing new mail but it is really just rebuilding the “Envelope Index” file. Start up Mail and test its speed.Give that a try and let me know how it works for you.

This kind of .Mac connection failure is interesting because often it is a password or username typo. In this case you have entered the same information in the online .Mac login and it works. That would demonstrate that her account information is accurate and it is something with how the iMac is connecting to .Mac’s servers that has failed.. As long as you are using the same display name (the email address without the @mac.com) and the same password that gets you into the .Mac web-mail, then it should connect the computer to the other services.There was an issue this last summer with some .Mac users being cut off by the Wanadoo/Orang ISP. You can read the long discussion but this particular issue was resolved (Apple Discussion). One interesting solution that worked for some on this discussion was power-cycling the DSL modem and rebooting the system. In another instance the 10.4.6 update broke some users’ connection to .Mac (Apple Discussion). I believe updating fixed the issue, but an interim fix was to remove the passwords from the Keychain and preference pane, then reenter them. If your problem is related to these past issues, using some of the interim fixes could be worth a try. You should also temporarily eliminate any routers or hubs and just directly connect the Mac to the DSL/Cable modem’s ethernet port. It may even be worthwhile to take the iMac to another location. If you can connect to .Mac from a different ISP then you know the issue is with Hiedi’s ISP, but if it will not connect at both places then you know it is a system configuration issue.As a last ditch attempt, try to connect to the iDisk as if it was not hers. From the finders “Go” menu mouse over iDisk. There is an option to connect to another users iDisk in the pop-out menu. Click on that option and enter Hiedi’s information. Connecting that way should tell you if you are blocked to all .Mac services on her computer or just the one setup inside the system preferences..I hope that helps some, let me know how it works out.

Apple Mail sometimes has trouble letting go of the past, particularly with SMTP outgoing mail servers. To get rid of your old .Mac SMTP server, open Mail and go to the Mailbox menu and select “Go Offline.” This will stop any mail activities that could be crashing the Mail application. Next, from the Mail menu select “Preferences” and click on “Accounts.” Click on one of your email accounts. From the pull down field next to “Outgoing Mail Server” select “Edit Server List” and click once on smtp.mac.com. Click on the “Remove Server” button and then click on done.

You may also need to remove your .Mac account from the Accounts list. To remove it, just click on the account once and then click on the “-” button to remove the account. After that you should be able to close the preferences window. Before you select “Go Online” from the Mailbox menu clear out your Outbox. Check to see if there is anything in Drafts waiting to be sent. If you can, delete everything in drafts and then go online.

First lets get your preview window back. That’s the convenient mail viewer that was below your messages. The good news is that it is probably still there just hiding. If you look at the bottom of your Mail window you should see a thin grey border line with a dot in the center. Move your mouse pointer over the dot. The mouse pointer will become a horizontal line with two arrows, one pointing up and the other pointing down. Click the mouse button and hold it down while moving up about half way up the Mail window. Let go and click on an email. It should now appear in the preview window as it did before.

Now let’s look at your sending mail issues. This was probably set up wrong at the Apple store. In the Mail application there is a menu called “Mail” and inside of it is “Preferences…” Clicking on “Preferences…” will open a new window. At the top of that window will be @ icon that you will need to click on. Now you will see a listing of email accounts on the left side of that window. You probably only have one there. Click on your account and then click on “Account Information” on the right. Towards the bottom of the preference window is a button that says “Server Settings…” Clicking on that will open another window were you need to put your outgoing mail settings. All Internet providers use different settings. Yours is AOL and they have the following settings. Your “Outgoing Mail Server” is “smtp.aol.com” and it is probably already entered in the text field. The “Server Port” needs to be 587 and the “Authentication” should be set to “Password.” In the User Name and Password fields enter the same AOL username and password you entered to get into your account. Click “OK” and there is just one more thing to do. Click on “Mailbox Behaviors” and uncheck the two checkboxes called “Drafts” and “Sent.”

That should fix it.

I have been using Mail for years and, while recognizing the limitations, I like the overall integration that Mail has with OS X. This being said, my recommendation is going to be based on the opinions of some of my coworkers. Most non-Mail users around here are in favor of Thunderbird as opposed to Eudora. This is probably because Thunderbird is free and has a lot of new development around it. Thunderbird is missing an Apple Mail importer however. Eudora has the built-in option of importing Apple Mail but you will have to pay $49.95 or watch advertisements to use Eudora. Although it is not automated, Mozilla has some instructions on importing into Thunderbird found here: http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#mail.app

Try following those instructions first and see if it works for you. If it fails to get you switched over then you’ll have to decide if the price for Eudora is worth it.

Sometimes when you are sending files that an email application can use, like fonts, the program can get confused. It does not know if you want to send those fonts as an attachment or use them for the text you are going to write in that email. I would recommend that you package those font files before you send them.

The best way to do this in OS X would be to use Disk Utility in your utilities folder. Click on “New Image” and when it prompts you to name the image, name it “Fonts.” Before you click on the Create button, make sure you’re saving to the desktop, the size is set to “2.5 MB,” and the format is “read/write disk image.” Now a “Fonts” disk should be mounted on your desktop. You can now copy all those fonts onto this “Fonts” disk just like any hard drive. After you are done copying files you just eject the disk. All the copied files are stored in the Fonts.dmg file also found on the Desktop. Attach the Fonts.dmg file to your email and send it over to the other computer.

Now if both your computers are running OS 9 then you are going to have to package the font files using a different method. Stuffit would be a good application to use for this. It will take those files and compress them into a .sit or .zip file that then can be attached easily to your email.