Setting Up Your Web Email in Mail.app

Better integration with OS X for your email

Automatic setup of new account. <br>Click to see a larger image

Automatic setup of new account.
Click to see a larger image

Many people use browser-based email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Most other email accounts let you access your email through the web browser like Safari as well.

There are two main advantages to accessing your email through the browser: No set up is required and you can access your email from any computer anywhere.

Browser-based email also has it's downsides. If you have many tabs open in your browser, the tab with your email can get lost in the crowd. Sometimes browser-based email "times out" after a certain amount of time and you have to keep logging back in.

The biggest downside to browser-based email, however, is that it isn't integrated in to OS X. There are many places in OS X where you can email directly from the app: email pics from iPhoto, page links from Safari, Tweets, etc. Email sharing is going to be much easier and more prominent in Mountain Lion.

Fortunately it is super easy to set up most browser-based email (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail especially) in OS X's Mail app. When you have your email set up in Mail.app, all the email integration of OS X falls perfectly into place.

Back in the bad old days, setting up an email account in Mail was kind of complicated and required entering what seem like obscure settings. These days, setting up an email account in Mail is as easy as entering your email address and password.

If you have never set up an email account in Mail, you will be asked for your email address and password when you first open Mail. If you already have at least one account in Mail (iCloud for example), just do this:

Go to Mail / Preferences from the Menu Bar.
Go to the Accounts view.
Click the + button at the bottom left.
Enter your email address and password.

After you enter your email credentials, Mail will verify that your credentials are valid and also if it has setup information for your email account in its database. If it does, Mail sets up your new email account automatically. In my testing, Mail was able to automatically set up accounts for Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live, and Comcast. One obscure email account I have was not found and had to be set up manually.

Once the account is set up, it will show an account type of either IMAP or POP.

IMAP is the best account type. It syncs your email so that it is the same in every place. This means that besides getting your email in Mail, you can still get it in your browser as well as set up an account anywhere else like the iPad or iPhone. Gmail and Yahoo! Mail both are set up as IMAP accounts.
POP works but isn't as good. A POP email account will download your messages to Mail and then you won't be able to see them in the web browser. With POP, you are best off only accessing your email through Mail or things are going to get confusing.

If Mail can't set up your email account automatically, you can still do it manually. This requires going back to the ways of the bad old days and tracking down the instructions. It will take longer to set up, but once you are done, you have all the advantages of using OS X Mail.

You can have as many email accounts set up in Mail as you would like, so it is a good option if you use several email addresses.

If for some reason you can't or don't want to set up your web browser based email in Mail, here are a couple of tips that can make your life easier:

Easily attach photos to browser-based email

Turn your web browser-based email into it's own "app".