Mail Help

[AzDesertTroll]

Sorry about these questions, I did try a search but just didn't find what I think I am looking for. I am a new Mac user and not a very knowledgeable PC user.

As I said I am new to Mac and wanted to set up my mail using the built in mail application but seem to be having trouble and was hoping someone would be willing to break it down Barney style and explain the best way to do this.

On the PC set up I was using MSN and Gmail through Outlook 2007 and Yahoo through the web browser. I was using two different PCs and Outlook 2007 was on both of them and I could receive the email on both and they would sync the folders between them without me doing anything. I also had rules set up for mail to be moved to folders based on who sent them (work, this forum, other forums, certain people, etc) and each PC would sort things.

I did purchase the Office 2011 for Mac that includes Outlook but if I can I would prefer to use the mail that came with the Mac, that is if I can set it up similar or the same as what I was doing before.

What would be the best option to use for the way I want to handle my mail? And what would be the best way to set that option up?

I should add that I am still going to have a PC (Netbook with Win7)

Thank you in advance for assistance and patients.

 

[agentphish]

Hi Jake & welcome & congrats on your switch.

I'd stay as far away from MS as possible. Mail on the Mac is wonderful.

You should be able to easily setup all three of your accounts, MSN, Gmail, and Yahoo directly through Mail.app on your Mac. Mail.app should automatically configure these accounts as IMAP accounts if available. Gmail and Yahoo should be, I don't think microsoft provides IMAP access to MSN, unless they have it special for people who are using outlook with it.

There is a good explanation of pop vs. imap here. I believe MSN operates pop only.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-gmail-anywhere-imap-versus-pop.html

I use iCloud email, 3 gmail accounts, a yahoo account and one personal email server account in Mail.app on my computer.

 

[AzDesertTroll]

Agent,

Thanks for the link, I have heard the terms a lot but didn't really understand what did what.

The mail app set up the Yahoo account perfect. I have not messed with the Gmail account yet because I got frustrated with the MSN. The mail app set it up as a POP account and it would not pull the old messages from the server.

The way that I was using Outlook on the PCs was through "Outlook Connector" but it doesn't seem like there is such a thing for the Mac. I've seen a few postings about an exchange server, will this possibly do the same thing as the outlook connector?

If I stick with the mac mail app is it possible to have the MSN forward to a Gmail or yahoo account then set up a rule to sort them into folders inside the mail program?

 

[agentphish]

Yes, MSN typically is a bag of doom.

You could do exactly what you said about having MSN forward to gmail. Then setup a rule inside of gmail.com to sort them into folders when they come in.

I'm not sure how it looks when you forward messages to another server because i've never done it so I'm not sure if mail.app would know the difference and be able to setup a rule for those messages directly, but you should be able to do it on gmail.com directly and have mail pull it in that way.

Good luck.

 

[AzDesertTroll]

Agent,

Thanks for the help it is greatly appreciated

 

[agentphish]

not a problem. thats why we're all here right?