With most of us now switched over to using Apple's Mail application I thought it would be good to go over a few things you might want to know about its use and some tricks I've learned over the past few years. 
 
Mail has some very powerful message handling functions which you may want to check out. One of those is the Junk mail filter. I've already set your Junk filter to move Junk mail to a special folder and delete messages from their after 30 days. If you happen to get a piece of spam in your in box, simply select the message and click the Junk button in the tool bar. Some non-spam (or ham as it's known) may find it's way to your Junk mail filter. If you know that someone sent you a message, but it is not in your in box, check your Junk mail box. You can train Mail to better differentiate between spam and ham by selecting the message in your Junk mail box and clicking the "Not Junk" button. 
 
Like many of you I receive quite a bit of email. Mail.app has several tools that help me manage my email a bit more effectively. 
 
1. One of the easiest tools to use is mailboxes. I have set up a folder structure in Mail that helps me store and find messages. Look in the mailbox menu & you will see the New Mail box item. You create mailboxes inside of other mailboxes by first selecting a mailbox in Mail and then selecting New Mailbox from the Mailbox menu. To put messages in these new mailboxes, simply drag messages from their old location to the new location. FYI – it's not a really good idea to keep thousands of messages in your inbox. This will slow things down significantly and make Mail work much harder to just show your new email. 
 
2. One other powerful tool is the ability to set up rules. Rules allow you to specify actions to run on messages. I have several rules setup in my system. I like all email coming from Fresno Christian addresses to go to a specific folder. To do this start by creating a new mailbox, I've named mine "FCS Inbox". In Mail Preferences click on Rules and then click Add to add a new rule. Name your new rule "FCS Mail" and specify From contains "@fresnochristian.com" and tell it to "Move Message" to your FCS Inbox mailbox. 
 
These are just two of the many things you can do in Mail. Next time I'll tell you a bit about using the Address Book application.