What’s New in the Mail app

In this video, we’re going to take a look at what’s new in the mail app with macOS Catalina. Let’s go into My Mac, let’s go and open up my mail app. Now, the first thing I want to highlight is we can now easily block senders. I have this email here, and I no longer wish to receive emails from this person. I could just go and unsubscribe, but sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Well, now what I can do is I can easily block a sender. To block a sender, all we have to do is just go over to the sender here, and then you’re going to see we have this little arrow to the right, this is where I can see the email address, but this is also, with macOS Catalina, is where I can go and block the contact.

If I were to select this, I would no longer receive any emails from this contact; they would be blocked. Now, in addition to unsubscribing to our newsletters, we can also block the sender. What else is new? Well, we can mute threads, but what does this mean? If we have an email thread, let’s say we’re going back and forth with someone in an email, this is called an email thread. What we can do is we can mute the notifications for that threat. To do that, what we would do is we would select an email, I’m going to go and select this email here, this is a thread. I click on it to select it. Now, what I want you to do is I want to mute any notifications from this thread. I will still get emails, but I will not be notified.

To mute it, all we’ll do is go up to the top here in our toolbar, and you’re going to see we have this little bell. I just click on it, and now this thread is muted. I will no longer receive any notifications from this thread when I get a new email. To unmute it, we just click on it again, and now it is un-muted. If you do not see the bell in the toolbar, maybe you’ve customized your toolbar, you can also go up to message, once you select your mail message, and then you’re going to see Mute. We can mute it through the toolbar or the menu bar. What else is new in Mail on macOS? Well, we have a new view. It’s an older view; it’s called Classic View.

When macOS 10 first came out, what we were able to do is view just the title of our email on the left here, and then when we select it, we could see what that email was on the right. The way that it worked was we would see the email at the bottom. This was called Classic View, and we access this through our preferences, our mail preferences. What they did is they changed that view, they’ve updated that view, and we can now access it from the View menu. This is a view that I have on my account. I’m using the new classic view; I like it. Why? Well, let’s take a look. I click on view, and then you’re going to see ‘use column layout,’ this is the “Classic view.”

I select it, and now, we can see all of my mail messages on the left, and anyone that I have selected will be able to see that mail message on the right. Now, remember how I mentioned in previous versions of macOS, I’m going back many years, when they used this Classic View. I mentioned that when you select a mail message, you could see the preview at the bottom here, it was split vertically, not horizontally. Well, we can still mimic that view as well. If we go back under view here, you’re going to see we have ‘use side preview.’ If I deselect this, let’s go ahead and uncheck this, now, it’s mimicking the old version of Mail.

I select my message at the top here, and then my preview of the message is down at the bottom. I don’t care for this; I like to have it on the side. I’m going to go back under view here, and I’m going to use the side preview. When we are using the side preview, we can set what columns we see here. We go back under view here, and you’re going to see, we have ‘show date and time,’ I can also show the two and the carbon copy as well as the message size. Let’s go ahead and select this, and now, we can see the message size here.

Wonder if you have multiple mailboxes, or you like to see your mailboxes on the left? All you have to do is click on Mailboxes here, and it expands out, and now I can see my mailboxes here. This is a columned view. I have my mailboxes, the messages within that mailbox that I selected, and the preview of the message that I have selected. It’s getting a little bit narrow here, so what I can do is I can go and widen this up, and now I can get a good preview of what I have selected. That is what is new in the mail app with macOS Catalina. We can now block senders in addition to unsubscribing from mailing lists, we can mute threads notifications from a thread, and then, we have a new view. It’s our Classic View, but they reintroduced it, and we can access it from our menu bar.

That is what’s new in Mail with macOS Catalina.