You know all about forwarding emails. If you get an email, and it's better answered by Burt down the hall or Susan in Australia, you forward it to them -- and actually, that's what you should do. For not only are you sending them the original email, you're probably also writing them a note about why you're lumbering them with this extra work. However, there are times when it's better to redirect than to forward: it's much the same, but the small difference is huge, and for some reason most people do not know this feature exists.
That might be in part because you can't do it on iOS, it is solely an OS X feature. This Pointers is also solely about the redirection in Apple Mail: Gmail has its own close equivalent in its forwarding rules.
Before we show you how to do it, let's not try to build any suspense here. This is exactly what redirect does: it takes an email you've received, and it sends it on to whomever you choose. So far that sounds identical to forwarding. However, with forwarding, your recipient gets the original text indented like a quotation, and they get it as coming from your address. So when they hit Reply, they're replying to you. In order to contact the original sender, they have to go through the email and pull out their address from there.
With redirect, it is exactly as if the original sender sent it straight to them instead of you. No indent, no quote, no message from you, no copy of your email address, and replies work correctly.
You do need to think about this when you're redirecting to other people: should you or shouldn't you forward instead, so that you can write them a note? It's up to you, and it's up to the situation. However, you can redirect to yourself too, and there are more reasons to do that than might seem sensible.
Sensible reasons to redirect to yourself
You've got more than one email account. You know you have. Maybe one's a work email address, while another is your real one, your personal account. It's never great, having several accounts, but it is often very handy. For instance, we have one that we bandy about carelessly online, accepting that it's going to attract spam. We didn't realize how much, mind, but while we haven't counted on our fingers, we'd say it's three per cent useful email to 97 per cent spam. We delete the spam, and we redirect the good stuff to our proper account.
That's because it's possible we'll miss a message in that spam firehose. Plus, it's a sad fact that most of the time, most people who want to email you will look up the last time you sent them anything and they will just hit reply. If we redirect the first message to our proper account, and then reply from there, the odds are that we'll get follow-up emails to the right address. If we think it might make a difference, we explain a little of what we've done: we say that we're replying from our personal address, the one that we keep for proper people. It's only a little bit of flattery, and it costs us nothing, since we actually are moving proper people to our real account.
That's what redirecting does and why you might do it, here's how to do it to the email that's right in front of you now.
The Click Here, Press That show
When an email arrives that you want to redirect, select it and choose Redirect from the Messages menu. Alternatively, press Shift-Command-E. It's not the most memorable shortcut, having E for Redirect, but Shift-Command-E is done with one hand on the keyboard, it's so similar to the movement you make to Reply that it quickly becomes muscle memory.
Then what your muscle memory or your mouse to menu hand/eye coordination gets you is an email that looks exactly as if you'd just chosen to create a new one -- except it has your sender's original text already in place. It also has an extra From line in the Subject that shows it's being redirected by you, but all you actually have to do is address the email and hit send.
Since the keystroke gets into your head quite quickly, that is all we usually do. However, there is a more visual way.
The more visual way
If you tend to click on the Reply or Reply to All buttons more than you press Command-R or Shift-Command-R on the keyboard, then make Redirect into a button. It's waiting for you: in Mail when you can see all your messages and the tools above the lot of them, choose "Customize Toolbar" from the View menu. You get a drop down with more tools than you ever thought Mail could actually use, and one them is Redirect. Drag it from the drop down into a place on your Mail toolbar.
Alternatively, maybe you're the sort who tends to double-click messages to open them. It's a habit with a lot of us that dates from back before we got three-line previews or we could read the whole message within Mail's browser. When the last Clinton was in office. Back when we used to walk eight miles to school every day with no shoes and it did us good, so it did.
If that's you, then don't bother customizing Mail's toolbar, customize the much shorter toolbar that comes with every email. Double click an email to open it, then choose the same "Customize Toolbar" from the View menu. This time you get the dropdown over the message, and there are fewer options. Still, Redirect is one of them, so drag it into place.
That's it. Redirect is just one tiny extra feature of OS X Mail, but it is hugely useful and it is deeply unknown. If only we could do it on iOS too.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)