Friday, March 9, 2012

Apple Mail Tip of the Day

Use the Keyboard pane in System Preferences to change the keyboard shortcut for “Add Sender to Address Book” to something that you won’t ever type by accident. I get e-mails from customers whose address books are full of spammy names and addresses, worried that their Macs were somehow hacked or infected, or that SpamSieve is malfunctioning. Nope, it’s just an unfortunate default key assignment. It’s easy to press Shift-Command-Y by accident when you meant to mark the messages as read/unread (Shift-Command-U, with U being next to Y on QWERTY keyboards). There’s no visual indication of what you actually did and no way to undo. In my view, this command shouldn’t even have a keyboard shortcut, but I don’t think there’s a way to remove it, so I changed mine to Control-Option-Shift-Command-Y.

Update (2012-09-06): On OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, don’t forget to update your shortcut to use the new menu title: “Add Sender to Contacts”.

Update (2014-02-25): In Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Mail no longer has a default keyboard shortcut for this command.

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[...] "Add Sender to Address Book" = "@~^$y"; "Michael Tsai <dropdmg@c-command.com>" = "@^$d"; "Michael Tsai [...]

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