When you bought your Mac, the first thing you do is setup your email, because you need to stay in contact with your family, friends and your work ofcourse.
In this step by step tutorial i will show you how to setup your email account for the first time. So if you are planning to buy a Mac or do have one but never tried mail? Then check out this tutorial.
Launching Mail
To start mail, click the mail icon located in the dock by default, or in your applications folder.
Welcome to Mail
When you open up mail for the first time, a new window will show, saying Welcome to Mail. Now you will have to enter details for your first email account.
So enter your name into the Full Name field, your email in the Email Address field and enter the password for that email account, so it can verify the data with the mail server. When you entered all the details, click Continue…
Incoming Mail Server
Now you have to tell mail, where to get the emails from, so you have to enter the incoming mail server.
Now the first select box asks for a Account Type, 9 out of 10 that its going to be POP, this is the most used account type.
But say you have your own excange server, then select one of the other options.
You can enter anything in the description field, for example AppleTuts POP server.
The incoming mail server is a address you recived from your mail provider, often starts with pop.domain.com, or mail.domain.com, your host also has given you login creditials, you need to enter those in order to gain access to your mail.
Incoming Mail Security
When you clicked next, again a new window will show asking you for security information.
If you want a secure encrypted connection, check the checkbox Use SSL, this will increase the security!
Now depending of what kind of Authentication you have, you might wanna change it to a other setting then Password.
Although most of the time the default authentication type is just password.
Outgoing Mail Server
So we setup our mail account to receive email, but we still have to setup the outgoing mail server in order to send emails.
So its kinda like the POP server settings, it will ask you for a description for example AppleTuts SMTP Server, and the address of the Outgoing Mail Server, wich most of the time starts with smtp.domain.com or mail.domain.com, now some SMTP server require you to authenticate with the server in order to send mail. If this is the case, check the Use Authentication checkbox and enter the User Name & Password that were given by your email provider.
Outgoing Mail Security
Now just like the incoming mail server security, you also have the same option for the outgoing mail server.
So this has the exact same results as i explained before.
Account Summary
We are finished! Check the summary and make sure everything is correct, if not just hit the Go Back button.
If everything is correct, click the Take account online checkbox and hit Create!
5 Responses
I have tried Mail numerous times and it doesn’t seem to work for me. At the Welcome to Mail screen I enter my full name and email (tombmx651@optonline.net) and the password for that email. I click continue and at the bottom it says “Checking connection to mail server “mail.optonline.net”…, it does this for awhile until finally it says “Trying to log into the SMTP server “mail.optonline.net” failed. Make sure the user name and password your entered are correct, then click Continue. If the information isn’t correct, you cannot send email. Please help!
Did you checked “Use Authentication” and entered the SMTP username and password? And does .optonline.net support SMTP, if not, there are many free SMTP services which allow you to send email using there SMTP server, and no authentication is needed.
As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you
Sorry for Off-Topic but: What wordpress theme are you using? It’s looking awesome, please write it in the comments, I’d love to get the theme too.
I have trying to set up mail to received mail and send mail from my mail but it seems not working, I follow the instruction given but not working.
The POP server “POP” is not responding. Check your network connection and that you entered the correct information in the “Incoming Mail Server” field. If it still doesn’t respond, the server might be temporarily unavailable.
If you continue, you may not be able to receive any email.