A poster on macOSXHints explains how to move around 
Mail.app’s interface using the keyboard.
Like the keyboard shortcut for emailing a URL in Safari, this is another tip that may not be as well-known as it should be. A number of people emailed to say that they would like to see more “basic tips” on Hawk Wings, so I’m going to town on this one. Power users turn away now….
You can use the tab key to switch between the three areas of Mail.app’s interface — (1) the Mailbox Viewer, (2) The Message List Viewer, the (3) Preview Pane and the search field in the Toolbar:
The arrow keys help you to move around within each area. For example, as the poster on macOSXHints points out,
if you use Organize by Thread (from the View menu or otherwise) and the thread is collapsed, a shortcut to expand the thread and automatically select the first unread email in that thread is to have that thread selected, then just tap the right arrow.
You can now navigate up and down the thread with the arrows and re-collapse it with the left arrow.
You can navigate around, expand and contract mailboxes in the Mailbox Viewer in the same way.
These tips can save you time as you learn to work without the need for a mouse. You can save yourself more scrolling and dragging and dropping by using Mail Act-on to file emails with a keyboard shortcut.
Mail Type Select offers even more efficiency. With this plugin installed, the Message List Viewer will jump to the first match for any text string you type in just like Finder. Nifty!
[P.S. An Intel version of ecto 2.4.1 is out, in which this was posted for old time's sake. Via TUAW ]
Strange. Not exactly the behavior that I get. It toggles through the (1) the Mailbox Viewer, (2) The Message List Viewer, the (3) Preview Pane, and (4) the Search Panel. This is in Mail 2.1. I don’t know if this explains the difference in behavior but I am also using the letterbox plugin.
Mark, you’re quite right. That’s lazy writing on my part. I’ve fixed the post. Thanks for pointing it out.
Sorry if I’m “starting a new thread” here, but: Is there a keyboard shortcut for moving to the last/first message? I dislike working the scroll bar every time I read an old message and want to skip far ahead..
So what do you use instead of ecto?
After buying a MacBook Pro and finding the PPC-based ecto impossible, I switched to using the blogging bundle that comes with TextMate
which is terrific (if you’re into that sort of relentlessly text-based approach).
@Uno:
http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/07/18/applescript-to-view-next-unread-message/
I’m sorry, but how old is that screengrab? it looks completely different to my mail.app, is this some of the hawkwings add-ons? my tabbing does seem to have the same results though. 1- mailbox 2- messages- 3 search
@jeanmi — agreed. I’d really like to know more about that panel on the right of the message body, underneath the ‘load images’ button. I can’t see any way to get that, but it looks useful.
Fred, that pane is provided by MailTags, the King of Mail.app plugins.
Thanks, Tim
Hi all,
is it possible to select text in the preview pane using the keybord, to reply quoting only the selected text?
I can, using the Shift and arrow keys. Can’t you?
Oh yes, thanks.
I tried with command, option, control, but not the most obvious shift.
Still, I can’t move the move the cursor inside the preview pane using arrow keys, so I have to select all the text before the rows I want to quote, then hit the right arrow key to place the cursor where i want and then select the text using shift+arrow key. It’s a little bit annoying :-)
Or am I missing something (else)?
I’d prefer it if when I tab-select the preview pane I already get the cursor in it, so I can scroll the mail moving the cursor, just like in a text document, select the text to quote using shift and finally replay using command+r.
[...] Jean-Michael took exception to a screenshot of my copy of Mail.app in another post about navigating around Mail with the keyboard. [...]
[...] Leà en TUAW ayer un enlace al blog sobre mail “Hawk Wings”, al que hoy hacen referencia en Applesfera, citando como fuente a Microsiervos… [...]
I cried with joy when I discovered this!
> Is there a keyboard shortcut for moving to the last/first message?
Type alt-up or alt-down and keep it pressed for ~1s.
Another nice shortcut you can use in email is this one.
I have the problem to quickly put my emails into the numerous folders I have (more than 250). Instead of taking your email and dragging and dropping it in the intented mailbox you can do a right click on the email (you cannot get the contextual menu from a keyboard shortcut) and then you type “mo” to get to “move to” section, then you press righ arrow key to get the list of your folders, then you can start typing the first letters of the mail box you want to put your email in, it will direct you directly to this mail box, then you can press enter to put it in or typing again the righ arrow to get inside this folder to reach another folder.
If you have all your folders displayed in Mail app left margin, you’ll get also all the folders displayed (hence reachable) in the “move to” contextual menu.
(Sorry for my english, I’m french…)
“…(you cannot get the contextual menu from a keyboard shortcut)…”
Actually you can, but it’s a rather hidden feature in the Mac OS X’s assistive technology: you have to turn on the screen reader (VoiceOver) which then provides a new shortcut to trigger the popup menu.
Why are so many navigation features reserved for accessibility in Mac OS X ???!!
Anyway, here’s another tip to help navigating in Mail.app:
Most features can be accessed via the main menu bar. So you can use CTRL+F2 to bring focus to the top menu bar, and then arrow keys and/or characters to quickly navigate through the functions.
If CTRL+F2 does not work, try switching-on full keyboard functionality in universal access by using CTRL+F1.
This special mode also enables CTRL+F3 to bring focus to the dock. CTRL+F5 focuses on the toolbar.
My last tip to switch between several Mail viewer windows (does not require Universal Access): use APPLE+TILDA (this is the key just next to the left-SHIFT key on my QWERTY Powerbook 15″. It also has the backwards single quote). This is in fact a system-wide key combo similar to APPLE-TAB, but which rotates through windows of a single application rather than switching between applications. I use it all the time !!
“Actually you can, but it’s a rather hidden feature in the Mac OS X’s assistive technology: you have to turn on the screen reader (VoiceOver) which then provides a new shortcut to trigger the popup menu.”
Thanks for the tip Daniel, but I’m not very sure I got it right. I went to System preferences and I turned on the Voice Over feature under “universal access”. But I could not figure out how could I bring the equivalent of the right click while I was in my inbox with one of my email line highlighted. Instead I only get these robotic voices telling me every step I do.
The key combo to get a contextual menu is:
SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-M
Obviously, the pre-requisite for this to work is to navigate to a GUI widget which supports a popup-menu. There is a thick black frame around the currently selected GUI item, so you know where you are. TAB and arrow keys must be used to navigate the user-interface.
For future reference, use the VoiceOver “cheat sheet” from Apple:
http://images.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/pdf/VoiceOverKeyboard_Color_v2.pdf
Hope that helps !
Dan/
It works. Thanks Daniel!
Option-up/down are useful shortcuts for navigating between discontinuous messages in a thread.
“Actually you can, but it’s a rather hidden feature in the Mac OS X’s assistive technology”
By the time you do SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-M, then use the arrows to choose the mailbox you want to move the message to, you easily could have just dragged the message there with the mouse.
Is there any way to move a message to a specific mailbox with a single keystroke? This is so key for GTD best practices.
to AstroMunch,
Nope, my inbox contains more than 300 mail boxes all sorted by customers / Projects etc…. So when I take a message I need most of the time to hold it at the bottom of the window and wait till it scrolls down to the desired mailbox.
Now my faster way to do this is:
(1) Ctrl click on the message
(2) Start typing “move to”, then I get to the “Move To” part of the menu
(3) Right arrow to get to my mailboxes
(4) Start typing the first letters of my maibox
(5) then hit enter to place the selected message to the chosen mail box
Yann
I use Mail Act-On and MsgFiler.
Me too ;-)