Filed under: Mac 101
Mac 101: Drag-n-Drop your way to a new Mail message
Instead of copying and pasting, just highlight the next you want to appear in a new Mail message. Drag and drop the text on top of the Mail icon in the Dock. A new message will be created with the text you just dropped on it in the body. Just type in a subject and address and send it off ... easy as 1, 2, 3.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
KomputarGuy said 9:13AM on 9-30-2008
I didn't know this, I find it quite helpful, plenty of times where I could have done this instead of launching Mail, creating a new message then copying and pasting what I need.
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Geeepi said 10:41AM on 9-30-2008
that's also great for multiple attachments: select multiple files in the finder and then drag and drop on the mail icon to make a new message with all files as attachments.
That's the only thing I miss with gmail web interface, does anyone knows of a way to do that with gmail?
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chris.wanja said 9:55AM on 9-30-2008
This also works for images, files, and so on. Any thing you can attach to an email can be be drag and dropped on to the icon.
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Jerry said 2:30PM on 9-30-2008
Not so much for me. I'd love to simply be able to drag an unopened email onto the Mail icon and have it attach the email ... or several emails. It works to drag an unopened email into a new mail message, but it's kind of a hassle.
Darren said 9:59AM on 9-30-2008
Mail.app is a great piece of software.
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Richard Frost said 12:28PM on 9-30-2008
Great tip, thanks!
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Jon said 10:10AM on 9-30-2008
You may need the latest update of Leopard, at least for files. There was a bug in the last 5 or 6 versions (including late Tigers, I think) that made Mail hang when you tried to drag a file to the Mail dock icon. The latest version finally fixes the issue.
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Gordon Werner said 10:18AM on 9-30-2008
or you could just select the text, go to the Application Menu (to the right of the apple menu), select Services > Mail > Send Selection
my favorite for sending URLs is Shift-Command-I (that's the letter i)
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Stef said 11:21AM on 9-30-2008
OSX Mail is a realy great piece of software, I've always liked it especially because of things like this.
Did you know you can also send whole websites, or parts of it? Try selecting this webpage (cmnd-a) copying it (cmnd-c) and pasting it in a new message (this is leopard-only I believe)... Or select a YouTube movie (click and drag your mouse from somewhere above a movie to somewhere below it) and copy-paste it in a new message, you've got a working youtube-player in your mail message!
One other thing i always liked about mail is the ability to send a folder right out of the Finder! Just drag a folder to the mail dock-icon, and you can send the folder so that the structure inside will remain the same!
Don't know how these things will be rendered by other mail-apps than OSX Mail, but it sure is nice. Just another thing that makes me love Apple products!
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isepic said 12:25AM on 10-04-2008
you don't even need to control-a/control-v
All you need to do is command-i
or shift-command-i to send just a link with the title pre-filled-in on the subject line.
Gabriel Radic said 10:41AM on 10-19-2008
...except Mail crashes when I do this.
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Bernard Ramsey said 10:16AM on 10-04-2008
And if Apple closes the iTunes store, I'll stop buying music. Well, okay, maybe not. Or how about this possibility: Apple steps up their efforts to market themselves as a music label.
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Bernard Ramsey said 10:19AM on 10-04-2008
Too bad not all Mac software has that "Apple intuitiveness." As you can see in the above comment that I posted not too long ago on another topic, 1Password seemed to remember my last post and inserted it automatically when I was just trying to login to TUAW.
All I really wanted to say was, Nice tip :)
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Vince said 2:30PM on 10-04-2008
That is awesome, I didn't know that. I'm not sure how useful it will be for me, but it is still awesome!
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