Mountain Lion: Hands on with Mail

When Apple released Lion (OS X 10.7), Mail received its biggest overhaul ever, gaining many new and noteworthy features. The changes to Mail in Mountain Lion are more subtle, though there are some nice improvements--along with one significant omission.

Inline find

Mail has always let you find text within the body of an email message, but in the current version of Mail, you use a separate Find dialog that highlights only a single result at a time; to find subsequent instances of your search string, you repeatedly click the Next button (or press Command+G). Mail in Mountain Lion gains a Safari-like inline find feature: Press Command+F (or choose the Find command in the Edit menu) and type your search string--in a field just above the body of the current message, rather than in a separate window--and the body of the message is dimmed, with every occurrence of your search string displayed. You can use the arrow buttons next to the search field, or their keyboard-shortcut equivalents, to cycle through occurrences.

(Image Caption: Mail's new Find feature is reminiscent of Safari's.)

You don't lose the capability to use Find & Replace, however. Whenever you do an inline find while composing a message, a Replace checkbox appears; check that box, and you can enter your replacement text, with options to replace just the current instance or all instances of the search string. The location of the find/replace fields within the current message window is more convenient than--and reduces the screen clutter due to--a separate Find window. It's also less confusing, as you'll never see a Replace option for an incoming message. On the other hand, you lose the Lion option to perform case-sensitive searches, but we suspect this won't be an issue for most users.

Notifications in rules and selective notifications

(Image Caption: Mail's Notifications options)

One of the marquee features of Mountain Lion is an iOS-inspired Notification Center that centralizes alerts and notifications from all your Notification Center-enabled apps. Mail takes advantage of Notification Center to alert you to new messages, but instead of displaying a notification for every new message, as with iOS, OS X Mail lets you choose which new messages should trigger notification alerts: messages in any mailboxes, messages that land in your Inbox, messages from your contacts, or messages from people you've designated as VIPs (see the next item).

In addition, you can also use notifications in Mail rules, as Send Notification is a new option for rule actions. So, for example, you could configure a rule to display a notification whenever you receive a message sent to your work email address, but not your personal account.

VIPs