Chapter 19. Mail and Address Book Email is a fast, cheap, convenient communication medium. In fact, these days, anyone who doesn't have an email address is considered some kind of freak. | Chapter 19. Mail and Address Book Email is a fast cheap convenient communication medium. In fact these days anyone who doesn t have an email address is considered some kind of freak. If you do have an email address or two you ll be happy to discover that Mac OS X includes Mail a program that lets you get and send email messages without having to wade through a lot of spam junk mail . Mail is a surprisingly complete program redesigned for Mac OS and it s filled with shortcuts and surprises around every turn. And this desktop post office offers more than just mail among other things you can also use the program as a personal notepad and a newsreader for your favorite Web sites. Not bad for a freebie eh . Setting Up Mail What you see the first time you open Mail may vary. If you ve signed up for a .Mac account and typed its name into the .Mac pane of System Preferences you re all ready to go you see the message viewer window described on Section . If you don t get the offer to set up an account choose File Add Account to jumpstart the process. That s also how you add other accounts later. If you get your mail from some other service provider like Verizon Comcast Gmail Yahoo or whatever Mail setup is almost as easy. Apple has rounded up the acronymladen server settings for 30 popular mail services and built them right in. All you have to do is type your mail name and password into the box Figure 19-1 . If eMail recognizes the suffix for example @ and if Automatically set up account is turned on then Mail does the heavy lifting for you. Figure 19-1. Leopard Mail takes the pain agony and acronyms out of setting up an email account on your Mac. Forget about remembering your SMTP server address or even what SMTP stands for and just type your email address and password into the box. If you use a mainstream mail provider like Gmail Hotmail Yahoo Comcast or Verizon Mail configures your account settings automatically after you click the Create button. .
