Apple Mail Setup

Apple Mail Setup

While the web-based Gmail is handy, you may prefer to use the Apple Mail.app client to manage your email. To set up Apple Mail to see all of the messages stored on your MCAD Gmail Account, follow these instructions.

1. Open Apple Mail.app
2. Click on the Mail menu and select “Add an account…”
3. Pick Gmail from the bulleted list and click the Continue button.
4. Enter your MCAD Email address and click the Next button.
5. Enter your MCAD password.
6. You’re now presented with a check list asking you to select what data to import.
   1. Select Mail to import messages
   2. Select Contacts to import contacts you’ve added to your MCAD account. These will be imported to Apple’s Contacts.app.
   3. Select Calendar to import your Gmail calendar appointments to Apple’s Calendar.app.
   4. Select Messages to import your Gmail chat contacts to the Apple’s Messages.app
   5. And finally, select notes to import any notes data you’ve created in Gmail to Apple’s Notes.app
   6. Click the Done button and Apple Mail.app will begin importing the data from your MCAD Gmail account.

At this point, you’ll begin to see messages pouring in! This process may take a while depending on the size of your mailbox. When it’s complete, you’ll have added your MCAD Gmail account to Apple Mail!

Archiving Messages

It’s best practice to keep the last year or two of messages around, but anything older than that should get archived. Using Apple Mail.app, you can save messages from the server to mailboxes located locally on your computer. Doing so will remove them from the MCAD Gmail servers, but it will give you the ability to sort and archive these messages while offline. Usually people do this to remove old messages from their inbox or organizational folders so that they are only ever dealing with the most recent messages. Anything archived can be stored on a back-up drive and only accessed when needed. To do this, follow the instructions below.

1. Open Mail.app
2. Choose Mailbox > New Mailbox
3. Choose “On My Mac” from the Location pop-up menu
4. Name the mailbox and click OK. We suggest that the name of the archive include a date. For example, name the file “Email Archive 3-14-17” if you made it on that date or “Email Archive 2014” if the archive is going to contain all of your email messages from 2014. If you name the mailbox you’ll have an idea which messages that archive might contain.
5. Next, click your Inbox, select the messages you want to put in the new mailbox and drag them to the new mailbox you created. The messages are copied from the mail server to your hard disk and then deleted from the server.

Strategies for reducing the size of your mail storage

Start by determining the size of your email folders by following the instructions Google's help article. Once you determine which folders are occupying the most space, take steps to reduce their size.

Suggestion 1 - Empty the Trash.

• Simply deleting an email does not remove it from the server. It gets moved to the Trash until you decide to empty and purge that trash folder. This can be done several ways.
• To manually empty the Trash: Choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Messages to remove the messages.
• To have Mail.app automatically empty the Trash on a repeating schedule:
• Choose Mail > Preferences from the upper left of the screen
• Select your mail account from the Accounts pane to the left
• Click the Mailbox Behaviors button
• To automatically erase deleted messages, set the "Erase deleted messages when" option to anything other than Never

Suggestion 2 - Clean out the Sent Messages folder.

• To manually delete Sent messages:
• Choose the Sent folder for your account from the folder list at the left
• Click on the messages you would like to trash and click the Delete button
• The messages will be moved to the Trash. Follow the instructions above in Suggestion 1 to empty the Trash
• To have Mail.app automatically delete Sent Messages on a repeating schedule:
• Choose Mail > Preferences from the upper left of the screen
• Select your mail account from the Accounts pane to the left
• Click the Mailbox Behaviors button
• To automatically delete Sent messages, set the "Erase copies of sent messages when" option to anything other than Never

Suggestion 3 - Clean out old messages you no longer need from your inbox and other folders.

• Click on a folder from the list at the left to view its contents.
• Select the messages you want to delete or archive. You can also click on "Select All" in the upper left to simultaneously select all at once.
• Click the Delete button to move them to the Trash. If you would like to archive them follow the instructions below.

Troubleshooting

Occasionally, something may go wrong and you might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages in the mailbox. For example, if email messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can't find all relevant messages by searching.

To rebuild a selected mailbox, choose Mailbox > Rebuild.

For IMAP accounts, locally cached messages and attachments are discarded and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your hard disk. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.

If rebuilding the mailbox does not fix the problem, please contact helpdesk@mcad.edu, or stop by the Help Desk (319) during regular business hours.