When Apple resign Lion ( OS X 10.7 ) , Mail received its fully grown overhaul ever , gaining many new and notable feature . The changes to Mail in Mountain Lion are more subtle , though there are some skillful betterment — along with one important omission .

Inline find

chain armor has always let you get text edition within the body of an electronic mail message , but in the current interpretation of Mail , you use a separate Find dialogue that highlights only a unmarried result at a time ; to find subsequent instance of your search strand , you repeatedly get through the Next button ( or public press Command+G ) . ring armour in Mountain Lion arrive at a Safari - like inline find feature film : Press Command+F ( or opt the Find command in the Edit menu ) and type your hunting string — in a field just above the body of the current message , rather than in a separate windowpane — and the body of the message is dimmed , witheveryoccurrence of your search string display . you may use the arrow push button next to the hunting field , or their keyboard - shortcut equivalents , to cycle through occurrences .

Mail ’s new breakthrough feature of speech is reminiscent of Safari ’s .

You do n’t drop off the capableness to use Find & Replace , however . Whenever you do an inline chance while composing a message , a Replace checkbox appears ; check that box , and you’re able to embark your successor school text , with options to interchange just the current instance or all instances of the search string . The location of the discovery / interchange fields within the current message windowpane is more commodious than — and reduces the screen muddle due to — a separate Find window . It ’s also less confusing , as you ’ll never see a Replace selection for an incoming message . On the other hand , you lose the Lion choice to perform case - sensitive search , but we suspect this wo n’t be an military issue for most user .

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Mail’s new Find feature is reminiscent of Safari’s.

Notifications in rules and selective notifications

Mail ’s Notifications options

One of the pavilion features of Mountain Lion is an iOS - inspire Notification Center that centralizes alarm and notifications from all your Notification Center - enabled apps . chain armour necessitate vantage of Notification Center to alert you to new messages , but instead of display a notification foreverynew message , as with iOS , OS X Mail lets you select which new message should trigger notification alerts : substance in any mailboxes , message that kingdom in your Inbox , message from your impinging , or messages from people you ’ve designated as VIP ( see the next item ) .

In addition , you could also habituate telling in Mail rules , as Send Notification is a newfangled selection for rule actions . So , for example , you could configure a rule to exhibit a notification whenever you encounter a message sent to your work electronic mail reference , but not your personal account .

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Mail’s Notifications options

VIPs

We all have particular people — our phratry phallus , our boss , our bookmaker — whose messages are more important than others . While Mail in Lion let you use combinations of rules , label , and letter box to make a particular person ’s message easier to identify or view , Mail in Mountain Lion adds a newfangled feature article that ’s custom - made for such purposes : dignitary

Mail ’s new high-up section

A VIP is any person you designate as being important enough to have their messages address differently by Mail . You fate someone as a high-up by click the star icon to the left wing of the person ’s name in any incoming or send message . You ’ll immediately notice thateverymessage to or from that person now displays a principal in subject matter lists , making it easy to retrieve those messages . In addition , when you designate a sender as a high muckamuck , that person gets his or her own entranceway in a new high muckamuck part of Mail ’s Mailboxes sidebar . Click a VIP ’s name , and you get a list of all messages , across all mailbox ( including Sent and Trash ) , to or from that individual .

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Mail’s new VIP section

you could also take advantage of VIP condition in mail rule : Mail includes a new condition call Sender Is VIP . Combine this with the newfangled Send Notification action mentioned above , and you’re able to configure Mail to notify you whenever email arrive from one of your VIPs . Of of course , you could also use any other available ring armour action on subject matter from a dignitary .

No more RSS

One thing you wo n’t find in Mountain Lion ’s Mail app — at least as it stands today — is the RSS feature . Whereas in Lion you could support to an RSS feed in Mail for be alerted to , and to read , newly published article from your favorite web site , that feature is likely gone from Mail in Mountain Lion . postal service ’s preferences windowpane has been stripped of the RSS pane , and there ’s no longer an Add RSS Feeds command in Mail ’s File carte .

What get to this omission specially curious is that RSS functionality also seems to be missing from Safari in Mountain Lion . It appears that if you desire to read RSS run in Mountain Lion , you ’ll have to turn to a third - party app — at least , if nothing convert between now and the arriver of the final interpretation of this OS X update in late summertime .