OnDeckTech August 05 Newsletter
4 tips in OS X Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail, dock and log files
This month’s newsletter focuses on a few quick tips, addressing perpetual questions we receive here at OnDeckTech, and on Website Wednesday Nights on WGN Radio, AM 720.
1. Yahoo Mail: why you can’t use a mail program like Apple Mail to check it (for free)
Yahoo, Inc. provides a free e-mail service with which most of you are probably familiar. It allows you to choose an e-mail address at the Yahoo.com domain, and provides you access to check that address using a web browser.
What many people do not realize is that you *must* use a web browser to check your free Yahoo.com e-mail! Yahoo makes money selling advertising you view as you read your e-mail through your web browser. If you were able to use a mail program such as Apple’s Mail, Eudora or Entourage to check your Yahoo mail, you would be able to avoid Yahoo’s advertising, an unprofitable situation for Yahoo.
If you choose to upgrade your Yahoo.com account, currently starting at $19/year, you then gain the ability to check your mail from a mail reader, and avoid Yahoo’s advertising.
Please note that Yahoo.com mail is POP mail, not IMAP, making it a less than ideal choice for those people with multiple computers, that want to keep their e-mail synchronized. Looking for a good IMAP solution? Take a closer look at .Mac, for $99/year, it delivers not only great, ad-free e-mail service, but also many other useful services such as computer-computer synchronization of calendar and address book information.
POP stands for Post Office Protocol, where POP3 is version 3, and is also known as your inbound mail server. Yahoo’s default address for this server is pop.mail.yahoo.com .
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It adds features and functionality to POP, making it especially useful for synchronizing mail across multiple computers, whether Mac, Windows, or both.
2. Apple’s Mail.app: how to correct auto-address population
It’s usually a real time-saver when Apple’s Mail automatically completes names and e-mail addresses for you even as you type them. Your Mac does this by remembering what you’ve typed, and looking for matches with past names as you type new ones in your To: field. But what happens when you mistype an e-mail address or name, or it changes? You do not want that incorrect name populating, requiring you to correct it manually each time!
To correct auto-address population, enter the incorrect address in the To: field. Then click and hold on the (incorrect) address. A contextual menu will appear. Select “Edit Address” from this contextual menu, and correct the address. Pretty straight-forward! Also notice the other options available from that nifty contextual menu..!
The latest version of Apple Mail, as of the publication of this newsletter, is 2.0.2. You can locate what version you’re using by opening your Mail program, selecting the Mail pull-down menu, and highlighting About Mail.
3. The Dock’s contextual menu shortcut
You may already know the Dock is the menu of icons accessible from your desktop, usually including the programs and files you most often open, such as Mail, and Safari or Firefox. You can drag things from and to the Dock to customize it to your liking, and using the Dock system preference, you can position the Dock on the left, right, or bottom of your screen, animate it, and even make it appear and disappear as you need it (moving your cursor to its side of the screen summons it when it’s hidden).
What may be new to you is the contextual menu available from the Dock. Click and hold on any icon, and you will receive a menu with convenient options such as Open at Login, Show In Finder, Hide and Quit. Furthermore, if you hold down the Option key (to the left of your space bar), you’ll receive two more options, including Force Quit and Hide Others.
4. Log Files: how to help others to help you!
Did you know that your Mac keeps track of its activities in log files, especially errors it experiences?
Within your Hard Drive, within your Applications folder, within your Utilities folder you’ll find a program called Console. Your Console will give you convenient access to your log files, where an experienced technician can often discover clues as to any underlying problems your Mac may have.
Take a look in your Console, you can’t hurt anything by viewing your log files. If you click on the Logs icon in the top left hand corner of the Console window, you’ll get a list of log files you can view. Select the system.log and note that your computer is keeping a date and time stamped list of its activities. Open the ~/Library/Logs directory in your list of Console logs, and notice there’s a crash reporter, and other program-specific logs.
Don’t worry about understanding the log file, even experienced Apple and Unix professionals do not understand every line. Next time you’re experiencing a problem, not only might you describe the symptoms to your tech, you might also impress her or him by cutting and pasting the log file from the time of the problem into your e-mail or chat!
You might also take a look at applications that allow you to view the log as it’s being written, such as Desktop Console: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11671&vid=
And of interest may be the program Activity Monitor, also included within your Utilities folder or directory, within your Applications folder on your Hard Drive. The Activity Monitor allows you to view the processes, or programs that are running on your computer, and see potentially valuable information such as how much memory (RAM) they are using, and how much of your computer’s processor they are utilizing.
Note that you can “cut and paste” by selecting or highlighting text, go to the Edit pull-down menu, then select Copy, place your cursor where you’d like the selected text to go (even in another program), and select Paste from the Edit pull down menu. Note that keyboard shortcuts for this process are right next to the options listed in the pull down menus.
Epilogue
Got ideas for topics for our monthly newsletter? Have feedback on this newsletter? E-mail me at the contact link above, here on the http://www.is.org site.
Thank *you*, for reading the OnDeckTech newsletter. And thanks to all of you who listen to our show on Wednesday nights on WGN, kindly visit our websites, participate in our free Mac help forums, and take advantage of our services. We also encourage you to tell your friends and associates about our resources, be sure to read about our paid referral program on our main website!
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