Setting up email on imac

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Hi my first post here as I'm waiting for delivery of my first ever mac next week, I ordered a 27" i7 3,5,16 GB RAM, 3TB Fusion Drive, GTX 780. :D

I have a German email account with T-Online and on my PC access it via Firefox by logging on at their website. I could never get on with Outlook so avoided it altogether.

What is the best way of using Mail on the mac? As I do now on the PC or do you have any tips to help out this mac newbie?

Thanks in advance.

Graham
 
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I like Mac Mail it will ask you a few simple questions and basically set it up for you if you use an iPad /iPhone and it gives you the option you may want to select IMAP over POP3 but its easy to set up as you will see when you fire it up.
 

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+1, agree. Mac Mail is easy to setup and use. If your ISP is one of the more popular carriers such as GMail, the setup is pretty much automatic. Be sure to choose IMAP as your protocol if you have other devices that you use to access your mail.
 
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chas_m

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+1, agree. Mac Mail is easy to setup and use. If your ISP is one of the more popular carriers such as GMail, the setup is pretty much automatic. Be sure to choose IMAP as your protocol if you have other devices that you use to access your mail.

Well, if your provider supports it, that is. Choosing IMAP won't magically make it IMAP unfortunately.
 
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Thank you all for your informative replies.

Sometimes I feel that I just don't get how email software works despite being fairly computer savvy.

For example I wanted to save my address book to an external HD so I can have a back up in case things go wrong, eventually I found the not ADRESS BOOK named folder in Explorer and copied it, then by chance in T-online's center I found a way to back up the address book from there, but no way I could see of recovering the back up should I need to later.

I think my email provider goes out of its way to make things unclear, unhelpful and just frustrating.

I just hope that when I get the imac next week I'll somehow get it organised.

Any tips and experiences you could share would be very welcome.

Graham
 
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Thank you all for your informative replies.

Sometimes I feel that I just don't get how email software works despite being fairly computer savvy.

For example I wanted to save my address book to an external HD so I can have a back up in case things go wrong, eventually I found the not ADRESS BOOK named folder in Explorer and copied it, then by chance in T-online's center I found a way to back up the address book from there, but no way I could see of recovering the back up should I need to later.

I think my email provider goes out of its way to make things unclear, unhelpful and just frustrating.

I just hope that when I get the imac next week I'll somehow get it organised.

Any tips and experiences you could share would be very welcome.

Graham
I would get an external drive and enable Time Machine right after you set it up and get everything transferred that way you will have a backup in case something gets lost or accidentally trashed lots of posters have regrets not doing so.
 
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MacInWin

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Email works like this: User types in an email, clicks SEND. The software then makes a series of decisions, randomly:

1. Will I deliver this?
2. If YES, where?
3. Do I care what the user put in the TO: field?
4. Why?
5. Do I deliver this today?
6. Why?
7. Too many questions, I think I'll shut down.
 
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I would get an external drive and enable Time Machine right after you set it up and get everything transferred that way you will have a backup in case something gets lost or accidentally trashed lots of posters have regrets not doing so.

Thanks for your reply osxx.

I've already backed up 600GB of photos, music and documents etc to 3 external drives, one of which ( 3TB My Book) I'll delete then format and use for Time Machine. I think I'll get Paragon NFTS for Mac to use to read from and write to the other drives.

Is this a good idea?

Graham
 
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Email works like this: User types in an email, clicks SEND. The software then makes a series of decisions, randomly:

1. Will I deliver this?
2. If YES, where?
3. Do I care what the user put in the TO: field?
4. Why?
5. Do I deliver this today?
6. Why?
7. Too many questions, I think I'll shut down.

Hi MacInWin,

Yeah that sounds about right for email software except you forgot:

8. Hide as much important stuff as possible so that the user has to waste a lot of time looking and still gets nowhere.

Graham
 
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Thanks for your reply osxx.

I've already backed up 600GB of photos, music and documents etc to 3 external drives, one of which ( 3TB My Book) I'll delete then format and use for Time Machine. I think I'll get Paragon NFTS for Mac to use to read from and write to the other drives.

Is this a good idea?

Graham
I was told a long time ago use one drive strictly for Time Machine outside of that get another drive for anything else.
 
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MacInWin

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Are you sharing the external drives with Windows? If not, then you don't need to get Paragon NTFS, just format the drives for OSX. These days most EHDs come formatted in NTFS to work with windows, but all you have to do to get it ready for OSX is to reformat using Disk Utility. Unfortunately, if you do that you can't read the drives on Windows, but if you don't need that, it's the better way to go. If you do need NTFS, Paragon is great (I have it myself).

3T is a BIG Time Machine drive. You may want to partition that and get some use out of the space. Or use a smaller EHD for TM. TM should generally be twice the size of the drive it is backing up, so if you have a 750GB internal drive, 1.5T is a good size TM drive. I use two backup systems, one is TM to a 2TB MyBook with two partitions, the other is Carbon Copy Cloner to a LaCie portable drive. When I travel, I take the LaCie with me just in case I have a failure on the road. By having two separate drives for the backups I decrease the possibility of having simultaneous failures on two drives, the main and a backup. It's unlikely, I know, but I used to manage data centers and I know how unlikely things do happen.
 
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Are you sharing the external drives with Windows? If not, then you don't need to get Paragon NTFS, just format the drives for OSX. These days most EHDs come formatted in NTFS to work with windows, but all you have to do to get it ready for OSX is to reformat using Disk Utility. Unfortunately, if you do that you can't read the drives on Windows, but if you don't need that, it's the better way to go. If you do need NTFS, Paragon is great (I have it myself).

3T is a BIG Time Machine drive. You may want to partition that and get some use out of the space. Or use a smaller EHD for TM. TM should generally be twice the size of the drive it is backing up, so if you have a 750GB internal drive, 1.5T is a good size TM drive. I use two backup systems, one is TM to a 2TB MyBook with two partitions, the other is Carbon Copy Cloner to a LaCie portable drive. When I travel, I take the LaCie with me just in case I have a failure on the road. By having two separate drives for the backups I decrease the possibility of having simultaneous failures on two drives, the main and a backup. It's unlikely, I know, but I used to manage data centers and I know how unlikely things do happen.


When my imac arrives I intend to put my 5 year old Windows XP computer to bed for ever, the hard drive makes worrying sounds after an overnight shut down and BSOD have been showing up too often. So I don't intend to share my external HDs with Windows myself. On the other hand my wife and son have Windows laptops so the option to share could be useful, which is why I think I'll get Paragon and leave the drives on NTFS. Otherwise I'll have to copy all those backups somewhere else before reformatting for mac and then paste them all back again.

As my new imac will have a 3TB Fusion drive the 3TB external won't be twice the size of TM. But that should be ok, shouldn't it?

Graham
 
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MacInWin

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Wow! Big drive...nice. Your backups will depend on two things: 1. How much stuff you put on that 3TB internal drive and 2. How often that stuff changes.

The way TM works is that on the first backup it backs up everything, then each subsequent backup is incremental, i.e, only what has changed. So let's say you have two files, A and B. On the first backup A and B are copied to the TM drive. When the next scheduled backup occurs, A has been changed so now the TM drive will have A, A' and B where A is the original, A' is the current and B is the original unchanged file. This action will continue with each backup. At some point the TM drive starts to get full, in which case TM deletes the oldest backups to make room. So, if you fill that 3G internal drive with lots of large files and change them frequently TM will back them up until it runs out of room. That functioning is why we recommend twice the size, but in your case I think it's more important that it be at least twice what you originally load on the internal drive.

Hope that helped you in your planning.
 
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I was told a long time ago use one drive strictly for Time Machine outside of that get another drive for anything else.

Yes that's what I intend to do osxx.

Graham
 
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Wow! Big drive...nice. Your backups will depend on two things: 1. How much stuff you put on that 3TB internal drive and 2. How often that stuff changes.

The way TM works is that on the first backup it backs up everything, then each subsequent backup is incremental, i.e, only what has changed. So let's say you have two files, A and B. On the first backup A and B are copied to the TM drive. When the next scheduled backup occurs, A has been changed so now the TM drive will have A, A' and B where A is the original, A' is the current and B is the original unchanged file. This action will continue with each backup. At some point the TM drive starts to get full, in which case TM deletes the oldest backups to make room. So, if you fill that 3G internal drive with lots of large files and change them frequently TM will back them up until it runs out of room. That functioning is why we recommend twice the size, but in your case I think it's more important that it be at least twice what you originally load on the internal drive.

Hope that helped you in your planning.

Yes thanks MacInWin that helps to make it clear.
As I have about 700GB on externals that I want to copy to the imac, the 3TB external for TM should be fine for now.

Graham
 

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