Airmail

Tips & Tricks

Written and published by the fine folks at The Sweet Setup.

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1 of 16 About The Sweet Setup

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2 of 16 Airmail Tips & Tricks

1. About Airmail for Mac 2. Using Send & Archive 3. How to Snooze Messages 4. How to use Quick Reply 5. Marking Messages as Spam 6. Using and Customizing the Swipe Gestures for Airmail on iOS

All written content and photography is original and copyright 2017 Blanc Media, LLC

Airmail, the Airmail logo, and its design are registered trademark of Bloop. airmailapp.com, bloop.info

The Sweet Setup and Blanc Media are not affiliated with Airmail or Bloop.

3 of 16 4 of 16 About Airmail Airmail is marketed as being a “lightning-fast email client for Mac,” and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. It’s extremely quick and responsive and looks absolutely beautiful. The interface is well-designed and includes many great design touches that aren’t present in other email clients, like support for translucency in Yosemite (and above) and Split Screen support for El Capitan.

Everything about Airmail is well-polished from a design perspective, and it just looks and feels like a native Mac application.

But, Airmail is more than just a pretty face — it’s also a very powerful email client with a lot of great features that Mail.app lacks, such as support for composing messages in Markdown. (See the screenshot to the right…)

The compose window in Airmail actually allows you to compose in Markdown or HTML by opening up a side-by-side interface where you type on the left and your formatted text is displayed on the right.

This visual preview of your message can be really useful as you type your message to make sure you don’t miss anything that would result in broken links or strange-looking text.

5 of 16 When it comes to receiving messages, Airmail takes a task-based approach. Each message in Airmail can be marked as To Do, Memo, or Done. Selecting one of these options will apply an identifier (similar to a tag) to the message and move it to the appropriate container inside of Airmail.

A To Do is (just like it sounds) something you need to do or take action on. For example, if your boss asked you to send an updated report, or your spouse emailed you to pick up something from the store on your way home, you might classify that as a To Do.

Once a task is completed, it is marked as Done, while a Memo is defined by Airmail’s support documentation as something that you need to memorize or store for later.

If the idea of managing tasks from your inbox doesn’t appeal to you, Airmail also integrates with many productivity applications like BusyCal and OmniFocus.

Creating a calendar event or a task with a link to the original email message is easy: just right-click (control-click or two-finger tap) on the email, select Send To, and then select the application to which you want to send the email link.

6 of 16 Airmail integrates with quite a few applications and includes a Plugin Framework API that developers can use to integrate their apps with Airmail.

Here’s a list of some of the productivity applications Airmail supports: Calendar, Reminders, OmniFocus, Things, Todoist, Fantastical, BusyCal, Wunderlist, and 2Do.

Airmail also includes several features that will be appreciated by power users, like AppleScript support and the ability to delay sending a message after hitting the Send button (giving you a chance to “undo” that angry email you sent and regretted a few seconds later). For Gmail users, Airmail supports Gmail keyboard shortcuts as well, and while the complete list is not supported, a surprising number of them are.

The one complaint we have with Airmail is the way that it handles your IMAP folders — it actually creates a couple nested folders inside of an [Airmail] folder that it uses to handle email-based tasks. It also lacks a couple of the innovative features that exist in Postbox (our runner up), but it’s still a great email app overall. If you were to choose Airmail simply for the beautiful coat of paint, what you’ll find underneath is a very versatile email client that will probably meet your needs.

Airmail is available in the Mac App Store for $9.99.

While there is no single third-party email client that is perfect for everyone, we believe Airmail is the best option for most people. It’s what we use ourselves over at The Sweet Setup.

And, with that in mind, we’ve also included a few tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Airmail…

7 of 16 How to use "Send and Archive" with Airmail

One of Airmail’s most prominent features is one that many people overlook.

Send and Archive allows you to send the current email you're writing, and then Send and Archive allows you to send the current email you're writing, and then archives the message you responded to. It's a great way to keep your inbox clean. archives the message you responded to.

Since Send and Archive is a feature built in to Airmail from the beginning, all you need to do is learn how to use it in your email workflows. When responding to an email with Airmail for Mac, there are two buttons in the top right corner of the compose window: Send and Send and Archive. The latter option does exactly what it says, and there are audio and visual cues to indicate what's happening.

PRO TIP: You can press CMD + Shift + Return to send the current email and archive the original message.

In Airmail for iOS, the "Send and Archive" feature is a toggle that's either on or off for all accounts. If it is enabled, then all emails that you respond to are automatically archived after you send a reply. For those that you don't want to be archived just yet, you can always tap Undo Archive to bring the message back to your inbox.

For emails that just require a quick response, the Send and Archive option saves you the step of archiving the email after you're finished replying. It ensures your inbox stays clean and promotes a "send it and forget it" way of emailing.

8 of 16 How to Snooze Messages in Airmail for Mac

One of the many great features of Airmail that we love is the ability to snooze messages for later. Many popular email clients have this functionality today, but in the case of Airmail, this feature is one of the items that make it our favorite email client for Mac.

If you're unfamiliar with how "snoozing" works in an email client, it's a way to remove emails from your inbox for a period of time knowing that they'll come back when you're ready. To accomplish this, Airmail creates a folder in your email account called "Snooze" where it temporarily stores messages that you've snoozed. When the snooze timer is up, the message is placed back in your inbox at the top of the queue.

In Airmail for Mac, there are several ways to snooze messages:

• Select the Messages & Snooze menu item. • Right-click a message, and click Snooze. • Click the Actions button (an upside down ^ symbol) in a message, and click Snooze. • Press CMD + D when viewing a message. • Use a swipe gesture to trigger the Snooze menu. By default, a swipe to the right using a trackpad will Snooze the message under your cursor.

After that, you're presented with a menu of options for how long to snooze the message: Later Today; This Evening; Tomorrow; Weekend; Next Week; Set Aside; Pick Date.

9 of 16 The first 5 options are controlled in the **Snoozes** tab of settings pane, but you can change the default times that snoozes operate by.

The Set Aside option simply moves the message to the Snooze folder indefinitely. You can go back to review it at some point in the future.

The Pick Date option allows you to pick a date and time for the message to come back to your inbox. Simply pick your time and click Set Snooze Date.

Once you start thinking in the mindset of snoozing messages that aren't relevant until later, the Snooze feature becomes incredibly powerful at keeping your inbox clean and timely.

One of the ways I use the Snooze feature is when a work email comes in toward the end of my day when I'm wrapping up. I don't want the mental “loose end” of an unread message that I know is sitting there overnight, so I simply snooze it until tomorrow. In my settings, this means that the message will reappear in my inbox at 8:00am the next day.

10 of 16 Using the Quick Reply Feature

When processing emails, you don't always need a full-blown composer window to type and send a quick response. One of our favorite features of Airmail is the ability to "Quick Reply" to messages using a quick keyboard shortcut.

For those emails that don't merit any signatures, lists, font changes, or any recipient changes, Airmail offers Quick Reply. Essentially, this allows you to respond to an email with little effort — similar to a text message.

To Quick Reply to a message, press CMD + E.

A reply box will instantly appear inline, just above the message you are reading. You can type in your reply email and send it.

11 of 16 After you've typed your Quick Reply, you can send the message, or you can "Send and Archive" by clicking either button or using the appropriate keyboard shortcut:

CMD + Return to Send CMD + Shift + Return to Send and Archive

What if you need to reply to everyone on the message thread, and not just the sender? No problem. Simply press CMD + Shift + E to quick reply to the whole thread and follow the same process as above.

This alternative method to responding to emails cuts down on visual clutter, and saves you precious seconds (and minutes, over time) during your work day.

12 of 16 How to mark a message as Spam

Spam is an aspect of email that everyone has to deal with. You might not always understand how your email ended up on a mailing list for "top-notch business consultants training," but you do know that it has no place in your inbox. Luckily, Airmail makes sorting spam a quick process.

When you receive a message that you want to treat as spam, Airmail allows you to mark it as such, and then it is automatically moved to a spam folder. The beauty of this is that after you manually mark a message as spam, Airmail learns from you, and it automatically moves those "follow-up" messages to the spam folder as well. Pretty convenient, right?

To mark a message as spam, you have a couple of options:

1. Right-click the message, and click Mark as Spam. 2. Click Messages from the file menu, and then Mark as Spam. 3. Press CMD + Shift + J.

It's that simple.

If you ever want to review (or quickly empty) your spam folder, it's located in the bottom left corner of the Airmail window as long as you haven't hidden the Folders view. If you don't see your folders, just click View & Show Folders to bring them back.

13 of 16 How to Use The Swipe Gestures in Airmail for iOS

Airmail has a fantastic iOS counter-part that boasts the same power features as its big brother.

One of the advantages that iOS has over Mac is the ability to use gestures. While the Mac does use some swipe gestures in the interface, they aren't as natural or fluid as they are on iPhone or iPad.

When viewing your inbox in Airmail for iOS, you can swipe left or right to access 4 different actions. In both directions, a short swipe triggers the first command, while a longer swipe triggers the second command. Best of all, you have complete control to define these commands in Airmail's settings.

Currently, I have my swipe commands configured like this:

Right swipe = Mark as Unread; Snooze Left swipe = Archive; Delete

14 of 16 These settings are perfect for the way I deal with email, but it's also incredibly easy to change what the swipes do for your email workflow.

To access the swipe settings, tap the menu button, and then tap Settings. From there, tap Swipes and tap either Right Swipe or Left Swipe to change your settings.

In the Actions list, select up to 4 actions to include in the swipe menu. To change the order in which the actions appear as you swipe, tap Edit and reorder the actions as needed to fit your workflow.

If you're like me, you might need to refine these swipe settings as you learn more about how you process email and which actions you need easy access to. Once you settle on that, the swipe settings make the chore of email much more efficient.

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