Mail keyboard tips...
Most people will be aware that the venerable TAB-key (⇥ on the top left of your keyboard) lets you move around the standard 3-pane interface of Mail.
As you TAB around you will notice different subtle highlighting reflecting the pane that "has focus". Which is a short way of say that this is the part of the window that will receive your keyboard input and with a bit of luck respond to it.
Mail Source List
Most of the time the "source list" doesn't appear to have focus and tends to look like this even when you click on a mailbox:
However, if you TAB or Shift-TAB until the "source list" in Mail has focus the currently selected mailbox will show a blue highlight, as shown below.
If you think about this you will wonder what happens when you start typing, well, if you press the down arrow (↓) on your keyboard the selection will move one step in the source list, like this:
This leads to another nice OS X standard, you can unfold/open a list element using the Right-Arrow (→)... like so:
Of course this also means that using the Left-Arrow (←) will also close the list element.
In my case I can also type the letter "i" to return to the Inbox at anytime, however, if you have a mailbox starting with the letter "i" you will jump to that rather than the Inbox.
Mail List
The "mail list" responds in a very similar fashion, ie. you can move up and down in the list using the up and down arrow keys, and if you're using the "threaded" view you can open and collapse a conversation using the right and left arrow keys. Interestingly if you start to type a sequence of letters the mail list will jump to and select an email based on the Sender or Subject of the email, handy if you're looking for something from Google (type go) or you know the subject starts with (Birthday type bi). The only thing to note here is that you need to type the sequential letters relatively close to each other in time otherwise Mail will thinking you're starting a new sequence to search for, the best I've got Mail to use is 3 letters.
Mail Body
The "mail body" responds to up and down arrows in the particular email by scrolling the body of the email up or down - which makes reading an email without reaching for the mouse quite easy. Unfortunately TABing or other keystrokes discussed so far don't do anything of value. In the next post, however, I'll tell you about another option for navigating the body of an email (without the mouse) that will return some extra benefits to you.
