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 ]