Email questions

It's probably not a good idea to post so many questions at one time. Anyway, I can answer Q1.

If you type cmd-0 (command and zero) then it opens up the Activity window and you can see the progress of all sending and receiving. Alternatively, there's a button like an up arrow in a box on the bottom left of the screen. You can click on this to see a docked version of the Activity window

Bob

Actually, it *does* show when it's checking for mail, but your mail server is so fast that it's over in a flash. By contrast, the mail server where I work is so slow that it takes at least 15 seconds before any mail starts to download.

2) Is it an IMAP account? You'll see that behavior as it synchronizes mailboxes.

3) Not sure. I'll try to pay attention to mine and see what I think.

4) Mail Preferences, Fonts and Colors.

5) It doesn't show up anywhere but in your mailbox. If you have pictures for contacts in your Address Book, it will show that picture for emails from that person. It doesn't get sent out, nor is it attached to the email.

6) Not sure

7) The Spam folder may be from your IMAP account. Select it and then select Use this Mailbox for > Junk from the Mailbox menu.

8) See 7

9) That setting only applies to embedded html images that are served up externally. If the image is an attachment, it will show.

10) Yes.

IMAP works better for that, but with POP, you can set both to not remove the messages from the server for a period of time. That way, you can download them to both. I think you should stick with IMAP, though.

TextEdit usually displays Word Docs ok, but it is not that powerful.

iWork contains Pages which is a more robust word processor. It can save files in Word format, and view Word Docs, but I don't know how capable it is of rendering Word docs.

You can get the individual parts of iWork on the Mac App Store.

NeoOffice/OpenOffice are both free and extremely powerful office suites; both of them will open M$ office files, such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Bob

This has strayed from the topic, but note that Word for Mac won't necessarily render a document in exactly the same way as the Windows version. Given that, it may not makes sense to choose to buy Word instead of something else just to read a few files, when there's no guarantee that even Word will display them the way you want. If you're going to need Word compatibility day-to-day, though, Pages does a poor job with complex Word documents (especially docs made by inexperienced folks that have all kinds of weird and unnecessary formatting codes), Neo/OpenOffice do better but are slow and buggy (in my experience), so you may want to bite the bullet and get a copy of MS Office for Mac.

I used to do a lot of Word-to-PDF conversions for my wife's office, to post documents on their web site. Pages and NeoOffice were all I needed - one or the other would display the file right. Since they've gotten newer versions of Word and have started saving everything as .docx files, I've given up. Neither of those apps was sufficient anymore. I was spending up to 30 minutes reformatting every document before converting to PDF, so now I just require them to do the PDF conversion themselves and send me the result for posting.

I don't think it does in Mail. Mail uses webkit (same as Safari) to render email, but I haven't received an animated gif in quite some time.

I don't think there is a header for attachment size. You can add and remove headers by right-clicking on the header and selecting the ones you want.

Thomas A Reed wrote:

Neo/OpenOffice do better but are slow and buggy (in my experience), so you may want to bite the bullet and get a copy of MS Office for Mac.

Gotta disagree with you here. I use NeoOffice on a daily basis and it is not in the slightest buggy. On the very very rare occasions I have reported bugs they've always been fixed within 48 hours. I will agree that it's slow to load the first time, but after that it's no slower than MS Office.

OpenOffice is a serious office contender, and NeoOffice is a beautiful implementation of it for Macs. OO has been around in various forms for at least 10 years and has a very mature code base. BUGGY it is NOT.

;-)

Bob

Barney-15E wrote:

I don't think there is a header for attachment size. You can add and remove headers by right-clicking on the header and selecting the ones you want.

The best you can do is select the Size option, which gives you the total size of the mail message itself and all attachments.

Bob