Using Mac Mail Conversation Features

In Mac Mail you can group messages together by conversation. This can make it easier to see your messages, stop quoted text clutter, and allow you to mute active conversations when you don't need to participate.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at using the Conversation's feature in the Mac Mail App.
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So in the Mail App on your Mac you have the ability to look at every single message as an individual email message or you can have them grouped together by conversation. By default conversations are turned On so you may have already seen this. Well let's start with it turned Off to see exactly what it is doing.
Here you can see a message that was received. It was a brand new message sent without being replied to another one. It's about a meeting. That message was received and here in the Inbox you can actually see several other messages that are highlighted because they are from the same person and seem to have the same subject. Friday meeting and then RE in response to Friday meeting. You've got these but they don't tell the full picture of the conversation. This is the first message. But this is actually the 3rd message. You can see here that I responded to this message but the response isn't here. It's not in my Inbox. It would be in Sent. Here you could see two messages that were sent as part of this conversation. So the total number of messages is five. The initial message, then there was a response over here, then a response to that, and then a response to that, and then finally this 5th message here. So this is all one conversation. Now notice how there is a lot of quoting that goes on. This is because when the person responded they simply allowed the message to be quoted and you can see many levels here. You can see the entire conversation recounted inside of this one message. So if you want you can just view this and you can see everything you need to see to recall the entire conversation that's actually physically in the message. So if you only had this message you would have all of this information there. You don't need the previous messages to see it.
Now the Conversation's feature in Mail now tries to make this experience better by showing you not only all the messages you've received but all the messages you've sent altogether and getting rid of all of those levels of quotes inside of the current message and any messages before it. So let's go and turn it On. I'm going to go to View and I'm going to turn on Organize by Conversation. Now notice first that those three messages in my Inbox are now one. If I select it I'll actually see all of the messages here. There's actually five of them. Three sent to me but there's also two that were sent from me. The conversation here is in the order in which it was received. So here's the original message and now you can see my Sent reply to that, then the response, the next response, and the final message there. It's all really clear and all of the that quoted text is gone. Now you can scroll around in this but also, if you select a message like that, you can see how it is highlighted, then you can use Option Down to go to the next message and you can continue using Option Down and Option Up to navigate through.
Now you also notice these little blue links. See More. If you select that it actually shows you all that quoted text. So, this is the full email message. It's just hiding all that from you to make it easier to read. Since you don't need this you have it up here. You'll see that for all of these. So this last one here, if I do Show More, I can see everything that is there. This is the full real message. All this stuff is simply hidden from me because Mail realizes I have it all up here above in these messages that are part of that conversation.
Now you can also expand the conversation here by clicking on the number. See that number, it says 3, click there and it expands all of this. Now you can see all three messages individually or View By Conversation. So it makes it a little bit easier to jump to the message that you want and just focus on that. You also can go to View and Highlight Conversations. What this does is if you are not on the conversation, say here, notice how this is a conversation and there's a highlight. So it is telling you which messages are parts of conversations as opposed to which ones are just individual messages. So you turn that Off and you can see that looks like every other message except for the number there. You also have the ability to expand all conversations. So you can go to View, Expand All Conversations and any conversations in this mailbox will expand. So if you would rather just have them expanded to begin with, and see them like this, you can do that. You can go to Collapse All Conversations to Undo that.
Now let's turn off Organize By Conversation right now and I'm going to go to this first message here and I'm going to archive it. Now I'm going to turn it back On, Organize By Conversation, notice now it only says 2 messages here. If I go through I can see all of the messages but now notice it says here Found In Archive. These messages here it doesn't say anything. But the ones in Sent, it says Found in Sent. So what's going on here? Well, these are considered to be related messages. If you go to View, Hide Related Messages, then you're only going to see the messages in the conversation that are in this current mailbox. Go to View, Show Related Messages to turn it back On. This makes more sense since you're probably going to want to archive or Move to Another Mailbox older messages but you still want to see the whole conversation when you're viewing a conversation.
Now there are some preferences in Mail Preferences here. You go to Viewing, there is a section for Conversations. So one is Highlight Messages with Color When Not Grouped. So what this will do is if you have Organized By Conversation turned Off these two messages are part of the same conversation. But I'm no longer grouping. Well now if I select this one, see how the other one gets highlighted. But if I have this turned off then that won't happen. So Highlight Messages is kind of a halfway measure. You can still see which other messages in the Mailbox are part of the same conversation but it is not going to group them together. You also have a default preference here as to whether or not related messages are included, messages from other mailboxes. You can have all messages marked as read when you start reading a conversation. So if you've missed out on a whole bunch of messages in the conversation then having this checked means that by looking at the conversation all of those messages are marked as read, not just the one you happen to have selected.
It's important to remember that conversations can take place between more than just you and another person. There could be several people involved there and as different people reply these will all get put together in the same conversation. So it is very easy to check your mail and find out there are three or four or more messages added to the conversation since the last time you replied.
Also you can have Show Most Recent Messages at the top. So this is really useful if you would rather have the latest message at the top and the original message at the bottom. Now if you're not organizing by conversation you can still go to View and then Show Related Messages. This will switch this conversation to be a list here of all the messages just like if you had Conversations turned On. But it won't effect other conversations. In fact, if you switch away and then switch back you can see it is turned Off. So it's not a toggle switch. It is something that you activate one time and it stays there while you're viewing that conversation.
There's also a Mute button up here in the Toolbar that you can use to stop getting Notifications about new messages to the conversation. So say several people are involved and there's a lot of email flowing and you're getting all those email alerts. You're hearing all those sounds. You can simply click this and it will Mute this conversation. You could see it there and you could use the same button to unmute. You can also Control click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad and choose Mute here to do it. It's also under Message, Mute.
There's another preference that you should know about under Preferences, General. There's Archive or Delete Muted Messages. If you have this checked and you're using a standard email account like iCloud or Goggle then messages in muted conversations will automatically go to the Archive Folder. If you're using an email service that doesn't have an Archive Folder then they'll instead go to the Trash Folder.
So Conversations in Mail are really a productivity tool. Most of the things that you want to do with email now, like responding, moving into a mailbox, archiving, deleting, and all of that can be done whether or not you have Conversations On or Off. But some people may find Conversations help increase productivity by grouping all those messages together and allowing you to see old messages that give you some context for the reply that you just received. While other people may like seeing each message as an individual item in the mailbox list. It is easy to turn it On and Off so you can use it sometimes and not others or give the mode that you're not using a try to see if you like that better. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mail (75 videos)
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