With Mail, you can send, receive, and organize email messages. When you read your messages, you can select content that you need to track, such as action items or requests, and quickly organize them in to-do lists. Mail also provides handy notes, to help you capture and organize your thoughts and ideas.

Your messages are stored in mailboxes. Some mailboxes are standard and are created when you set up a mail account. Standard mailboxes include the:

Some mailboxes are added when you first use a feature, such as the To Do, Notes, and RSS mailboxes. You can create your own mailboxes to organize messages by specific categories, such as “friends” or “work projects.” All your mailboxes and folders appear in a vertical sidebar in the viewer window.

You can set Mail to be your default email application, so that when you use any application that needs to send mail (for example, if you click a link in a web browser that creates a new email message), Mail will be used. To set Mail as your default email application, choose Mail > Preferences and click General. Choose Mail from the Default Email Reader pop-up menu.

If you set up Time Machine to back up files on your computer, your mailboxes and their contents have been backed up regularly, based on the schedule you set for Time Machine. You can use Time Machine to quickly recover previous versions of your mailboxes. You can also archive mailboxes at any time using Mail.