An anonymous MacDailyNews reader notes that Apple’s .Mac Webmail has added two new features recently:
Email Aliases
You can use email aliases instead of your .Mac email address to keep your .Mac account private (such as when purchasing online) or to easily recognize and organize incoming emails from various sources. Simply deactivate or delete an email alias to keep unwanted email from arriving in your Inbox.
You can create multiple email aliases to help prevent unwanted messages from being sent to your primary .Mac Mail account or for use with online groups and chat sites. For example, you might want to share your main mac.com address with friends and family only, and use email aliases for online registrations, purchasing products, joining mailing lists, and so on. This will help you better manage the mail you receive and monitor the sources of unwanted messages. You can even send mail using an email alias.
To create an email alias:
1. Go to [url=http://www.mac.com]http://www.mac.com[/url] and click Mail.
2. Click Preferences, and then click Accounts.
3. If you haven’t created an email alias, click Create Alias. If you already created an email alias, click Add to add another alias. You can maintain up to five aliases at a time.
4. Enter an email alias in the text field, choose a color for messages received by the alias, and click Create Alias.
Once you create an alias, you can turn it off and on, choose a new color for messages received by the alias, or delete the alias at any time. If you created an email alias, you can turn it on or off at any time. When an alias is turned on, you will receive all mail addressed to that alias. When an alias in turned off, all mail addressed to that alias will be returned. This is a helpful feature if you use an alias to make a purchase and want to follow the purchase through to delivery. You can then turn the alias off to avoid follow-up advertisements, and turn it on again when it’s required to make another purchase.
Note: You can maintain up to five aliases at a time. If you are currently maintaining five aliases and decide to delete one, you must wait seven days before you can create a new alias to replace the one you deleted. The seven-day waiting period also affects any other alias you delete within seven days following this deletion.
Spell Checking
Apple’s .Mac offers a new “Check spelling as I send” checkbox in your .Mac Webmail Preferences. The spell checker supports multiple languages. If you’re using .Mac Mail on the web, you can check a message for spelling errors before you send it. You can also set .Mac Mail preferences to automatically check for spelling errors each time you send a message.
To check spelling:
1. Compose your message and click Spell Check. Questionable spellings are underlined in red.
2. Position your pointer over an underlined word and choose one of the following from the pop-up menu:
To accept a suggested spelling, choose the word you want.
To accept the current spelling, choose Ignore.
To accept the current spelling and add it to your .Mac user dictionary, choose Learn.
To correct the spelling yourself, choose Edit, type your changes, and click OK.
Once you edit a word, it is underlined in gray.
To set your .Mac Mail preferences to automatically check for spelling errors each time you send a message, go to [url=http://www.mac.com]http://www.mac.com,[/url] click Mail, and then click Preferences. Click Composing and select the “Check spelling as I send” checkbox. If necessary, choose a different language for your default dictionary from the pop-up menu.
More about Apple’s .Mac Webmail here.
That sounds totally cool! Thanks, Apple!!
Hey that is pretty cool. Maybe this is a sign that we’ll be getting storage increases and other stuff soon. Well, a person can hope.
That email alias thing sounds pretty cool.
As for the spell check thing: if you are using Safari, you can set Safari to spell check as you type using Edit>Spelling>Check Spelling As You Type. I think a lot of MacDailyNews readers need to enable this feature, as I see some horrible spellin and grammare mistakes on hur.
tanks, i wus wondring where that funktion was for safari. i will be usng it from now on.
sorry gary, that was supposed to say eaxit.
I hope they bump up storage space as well (for both email, and iDisk). If places like Google, and Yahoo! can do it (for FREE), then I know Apple can do it for $99/year.
This is a great feature, but how about now at least doubling the size of the iDisk and mail storage at least for starters…
While we can receive mail through the alias, can we Send mail throught it?
To Frank : from the webmail application YES. When you compose a message you have access to a popup showing all the aliases and your main .mac account. Choose the one you want to use to send the mail.
I did not try with Mail app. I will have to try tonight at home (PC @ work).
Add Hotmail to the bunch jumping on the bandwagon for bigger email storage. Oooooh…250mb for their shitty email service. I hate M$!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3835495.stm
In order to combat them, I put my Gmail invites up on http://www.gmailfortroops.com as per http://www.wilwheaton.net
No soldier of ours should have to deal with M$!
Spell checking as you type is not the same as Spell Check When Sending. I wish that we could have Spell Check as You Send in Mail.app.
Please explain the difference between check as you type and when you send, other than the obvious. It’s the same spell check, right? What’s the big mystery?
This is so needed. I’ve been wanting something like this. I was going to let my .Mac account expire next month, but now I will renew. Thanks Apple! And thanks MDN for the heads-up!
Could not send mail via Mail app from alias. Could only do so via [url=http://www.mac.com]http://www.mac.com[/url]
I concur with Mike. I tried various account configurations in Mail, but no luck. The alias account doesn’t have its own .Mac password attached to it. Perhaps this will be a feature within an upcoming Mail update.
Being that this function isn’t advertised yet on the .Mac home web page, I think it’s functionality was turned on, but it isn’t operating at 100% as they would want it. This may include sending alias email via the Mail ap.
Of course you couldn’t send email from Mail.app using an alias. An alias is just another email address that is manageable from your main email addresses. So you couldn’t send it from mike@hotmail.com for instance, because most of those “aliases” are already taken. But with .Mac, since it’s new, and will have a very small percentage that something like Hotmail or Yahoo would have, they can do this.
Perhaps disregard my last post. I think I misunderstood what you guys were talking about. I thought you meant you tried to hack some unknown alias through Mail.app.
Hack an unknown alias? I can’t even hack a known alias through Mail.app
Everyone in the real IT world knows that spell-checking will never fly. When I receive virus emails, words or subject headers are almost always misspelled. That helps me identify the hundred or so viruses that attack my Windows machine every day, and I’m grateful they’re not spell-checked. You Mac users could never function in the real IT world.
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Yeah, I thought you guys were talking about something else, but when I went back and read it, I realized you were talking about real aliases that you had created through .Mac but couldn’t access through Mail.app.
Macs don’t get viruses. Didn’t you know?
“tanks, i wus wondring where that funktion was for safari. i will be usng it from now on.”
Hey eaxit – that was the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. Thanks for the laugh!
What if I use an alias for some internet registration or purchase or whatever, and then delete that alias a month later, would that alias be up for grabs for other .Mac members? And if so, wouldn’t the next person who uses my ex-alias receive mail that was supposed to be received by me?
Just a thought.
I managed to create a load of ‘alias’ email ‘accounts’ in Mail (app) by just leaving the password field blank etc. I confuses Mail (makes you think you’re off-line when you aren’t, asks for your passwords a lot etc.) but it does work. I was able to run loads of ‘separate’ email ‘accounts’ (which were included in the drop-down ‘send’ menu) from my single demon account. However, Mail crashed a few times and then, eventually, the whole computer started crashing and behaving weirdly. I couldn’t isolate whether this was me fiddling with Mail or Norton Internet Security 3.0 (even with the Panther update), but it needed a reformat and reinstall to sort it out properly so I’m not fiddling with Mail or installing Norton now. Was/am I missing something? I’d have thought the ability to run a number of ‘phantom’ e-mail accounts (that is to say, with different ID prefixes before the @username) should be available in Mail for those with this facility on their ISP (i.e. ‘unlimited’ e-mail ‘accounts’). Any insight?