Page 685 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Mark item as read. When do you want Mail to indicate that

you’ve actually read a message?

Your options include “When selection changes” (that is, when you
choose another message); “Don’t automatically mark item as read”
(that is, you have to mark it as read manually); and “When viewed

in the reading pane.” That last one makes Mail flag a message as
read only after you’ve had it open long enough to actually read it
(and you can change the number of seconds that implies).

Caret browsing means that, when you’re reading an email
message, your up/down arrow (and Page Up/Page Down keys)

move an insertion-point cursor through the text instead of simply
scrolling the text.

(Oh, and you can hold down the Shift key to select the text as you

go. That’s especially useful when you’re selecting text on a web
page or heavily laid-out email message, because it captures only
the text in the current column. If you simply drag your mouse

through a web page, you might also accidentally highlight stuff
that’s off to the side, like ads or list boxes or other stories. And
when you copy and paste that selection, you wind up with a

nightmare of intermixed text from different columns. Selecting text
with, for example, Shift+arrow keys, prevents that phenomenon.)

That’s commonplace in word processing, of course, but Microsoft

offers it to you here to use on a web page or when editing email.

External content. Spammers, the vile undercrust of low-life

society, have a famous trick. When they send you email that
includes a picture, they don’t actually paste the picture into the
message. Instead, they include a “bug”—a piece of code that

instructs your email program to fetch the missing graphic from the
internet. Why? Because that gives the spammer the ability to track
who has actually opened the junk mail, making their email

addresses much more valuable for reselling to other spammers.