Joel, one of my friends from the Hershey Apple Core User Group, asked a question that I hear too often.

It seems that when he types an address in Mail, old and incorrect addresses pop up in the To field.

This ability for Apple’s Mail program is one of its best features, but it can also be one of the most frustrating ones. There is a special list of previous email recipients that Mail keeps track of. To see the list, go to the Window menu in Mail and select Previous Recipients.

A window like this one will appear. I have resized the columns so that I have not exposed the addresses of my friends and clients.

This is a list of all the people you have sent email to since you began using Mail, cleared the list, or removed addresses. If you have made mistakes in typing in addresses, those are also captured. Look at this name in my list:

If I type in Still, Mail will fill it in as an address. Notice that there is no @ sign, and no email server in the listing--but Mail will still use it.

Is this a bug? No. Mail will allow you to send emails to a whole group of people who are in a special list in your address book and those lists do not have the @somewhere.com as a part of their name. The are designated by the Groups list in your Apple Address book.

If you are getting old or incorrect addresses when you are adding recipients to emails, take a few minutes to clean out the errors in Previous Recipients.

Le’s spend a few more minutes to explore some of the things you can do in Previous Recipients.

I know that many Apple users don’t realize that the column headers in the window below are actually sort buttons.

If you click on the name button, the list will be sorted alphabetically by the person’s name. Do you see the little arrow at the end of the Name button? That arrow determines the sort order. If the arrow is pointing up, the list will be sorted from A to Z by last name. If the arrow points down, the list will be sorted from Z to A (The items without names will be at the bottom of the list in Previous Recipients).

If you click the Email button, the Previous Recipients list will be sorted by email addresses. Again, the triangles will determine the sort order.

If you click the Last Used button, the Previous Recipients List will be sorted by the date you last used the address. In this case, the up arrow will put the oldest addresses at the top. The down arrow will put the most recently used addresses at the top of the list.

Did you notice the little icon that appears before Frederick Apple C? That icon lets me know that the email address for Frederick Apple C is in my Address Book.

The next time you are on hold on the telephone, consider cleaning up your Previous Recipients list. Begin by looking for incomplete addresses. Then sort the addresses by name and delete older addresses when you have multiple addresses for the same person, consider eliminating the older ones. Think about eliminating addresses that you have not used in several years. Highlight addresses for friends that are not in your address book and use the button in the lower right corner of the window to add them to your address book.

If your addresses are in really bad shape, you may want to select all of the addresses (Command A), press the Remove from List button and start all over again!

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--Pat

While adding notes to calendar events and people in your address book are good for many purposes, there are other notes that need to be somewhere else.

Until the release of iPhone OS 3 I used several different note apps on my iPhone. Each had some method of syncing, most involved having another application on my computer. That was one more thing to add to my dock and often one more web site to pay money to each year.

Now that the Notes Application on my iPhone

…can sync with the Notes in Mail

…I am pretty happy.

Let’s review how this works.

When you open the Notes app on the iPhone, you will see one of the two screens below. If you see this screen, you either have no notes or you are looking at notes you have previously made. To add a note, click the plus icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

If you see this screen, you are looking at the note you were last using. Click the plus icon in the upper right to add another note. Click the arrow icons at the bottom of the screen to navigate to your other notes. The envelope icon attaches the note to an email so that you can send it to someone. The Trash can icon deletes the note.

If you want to add a note on your computer, it is done in Mail:

Click on the Note icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen to add a new note. Click on the Notes icon in the Mail sidebar to view your notes.

There are many options when making Notes in Mail. It is possible to change fonts and colors, attach files and photos and even to make To Do items in a note:

Syncing notes

While it is possible to sync Mail accounts, Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks to the iPhone using MobileMe, Notes are not included.

Instead, synching is set up in iTunes:

This means that in order to see the latest changes you have made on the other device (iPhone or Mac), you must connect your iPhone to the Mac and do a sync.

While there are lots of other applications that can be used for notes, I prefer Apple’s Notes application. Since it is an application made by Apple Inc., I can check my notes at any time. For example, when I am talking on the telephone, playing a game, listening to my podcast or music. For me this availability is not to be missed!

--Pat

Tags: iPhone

I see lots of Macintosh computer users using Safari. And I see lots of them using the Safari toolbar just the way it came.

We all know that Apple is a minimalist company when it comes to esthetics--but minimalism doesn't make Safari easy to use. It is bare! There is no home button, no print button, no resize button.



This is my Safari tool bar. Look at all those strange icons. Those strange icons make it so easy to really use Safari.



So, how did I put them in my toolbar? I used View > Customize Toolbar…



This is window you will see:



At the bottom of the window you will see the default toolbar. Above it, you will see lots of icons that you can add to Safari. Drag the icons up to the Safari toolbar. Click the Done button in the lower right corner when you are finished. While you may not want to add all of them, here are several that you may want to add.

First, add the Home button:



Click it and you will return to the page that first opens when you start Safari. That can be any page you like--and that will be the topic of another blog post!

The Zoom button is very useful:



It allows you to instantly make not only the text, but also the graphics bigger (or smaller) on a web page. Now that my eyes are over 40, I find this to be very useful.

Two more icons that I find to be very useful are the Mail and Print buttons:



Since I do most of my news reading on the web these days, and since I frequently want to send a web page address to someone, this Mail button is very convenient. It opens a new message window in Mail with the subject and the web address already in place. I only need to address the message and write a quick note:



The Print button opens the Print window. While I could just print the page, instead, I usually make a PDF of the page and file it away in the appropriate place on my computer.



If your Print window looks different than mine, you need to click this disclosure triangle to see the really useful Print window shown above:



There are lots more buttons that you can add to the Safari toolbar. Do some more exploring. You can always go back to the View > Customize Toolbar… window to add or remove them.

--Pat

Tags: Safari

You know the drill. You compose an email and send it out--and then suddenly you get a message like this one in your mailbox:
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