Related Articles
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
The OS X Mail app received an update with El Capitan, making the constant chore of keeping pace with your email inbox a little less arduous. Namely, it borrows a few swipe gestures from iOS while adding a few useful tweaks to Mail’s fullscreen mode.
Just as you can in Mail for iOS, the Mail app with OS X El Capitan lets you swipe left or right to trash an email or mark it as read or unread. A two-finger swipe to the left on a message header reveals a red Trash button, while swiping right with two fingers reveals a blue Mark as Read/Unread button. The trash, archive and flag buttons remain at the top of the Mail window, next to the reply, reply all and forward buttons.
In fullscreen mode, you can now blissfully minimize an email compose window. Before, your inbox was held hostage behind an email you were composing until you sent it or saved it as a draft. With El Capitan, the yellow minimize button pushes the compose window to the bottom of Mail, where it sits in a similar fashion to iOS, where you can swipe down on the compose window to reduce it to a banner.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
The compose window also borrows a bit from Safari — or any modern browser for that matter. If you are in the midst of composing more than one email at a time while in fullscreen mode, your various emails in process are displayed as tabs in the compose window.
And similar to the new Spotlight, you can use natural language searches to find, for example, “emails from Monday” or “unread from Amazon.”
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Lastly, Mail now works more closely with your calendar. When you get an email with an offer to meet up for drinks or a less enjoyable appointment, the email will show an event banner under the subject line that lets you quickly add the event to your calendar.
For more, get all you need to know about OS X El Capitan.
