It provides an interface to the search functionality that was previously only available when creating a smart mailbox. If you stick with the new layout, however, you can customize the message list a good bit, selecting how many lines (from none to 5) of each message to preview and whether to show a picture of each sender (based on pictures in your address book).Īs Phil Schiller demonstrated at the WWDC keynote, Lion has a new search method that’s used in Mail and the Finder. Or, if you don’t want to use the favorites bar, you can hide it (but if you do a search it slides down so you can still filter by mailbox).Īnd if you don’t like any of this new stuff you can still get the classic, messages-on-top layout.
OS X MAIL PREVIEW PANE FULL
If you need the full mailbox list there is an icon on the far left of the favorites bar to show and hide it. The thinking is that you can hide the mailbox sidebar most of the time and just use the favorites bar. Speaking of the favorites bar, it’s a list of mailboxes that you can customize. Search mailbox filters in developer preview 4. In the earlier developer previews this was moved to a spot above the new message list, but in the most recent developer preview it has been integrated with the new “Favorites” bar. In Snow Leopard and earlier, when you started searching a bar would appear above the messages list allowing you to restrict search to a specific mailbox. The new layout has also prompted a change to the search filters bar. The new layout has a little less flexibility and looks a bit cramped with every option turned on. With the old layout it was easy to add a column to the list view if you wanted to see, for example, the number of attachments. For example, with the switch to a stack of messages on the side they’ve had to add a sort drop down (previously handled by clicking the column headers in the spreadsheet-like view). You might not guess that it would take much work to move a list of messages from appearing above the message preview to the side, but a lot of Mail’s previous functionality was based on having that wide, spreadsheet-style list of messages. Moving to a columnar layout has a surprising number of implications.
OS X MAIL PREVIEW PANE UPDATE
Mail has received perhaps the biggest update of any of the pre-installed applications in Lion, with a column-based layout, new search methods, improved conversation threads, updated icons, and better support for Exchange and Gmail.