Composing

Press c or click the compose button to start a message. Sending has a five-second Undo window before anything leaves your machine. During that window you cannot edit the message. Undo puts the cursor back where it was.

A window of its own

Open in a new window in the composer's header (⌘⇧O / Ctrl+Shift+O) moves the message you are writing into a separate window, attachments and draft included, so you can keep reading mail while you write. Several can be open at once. Closing the window saves the draft, as closing the panel does.

From address and aliases

The From selector appears whenever there is more than one address to send from: several accounts, or an account with aliases. Add aliases in Settings → Accounts → the account's row: each alias is a name and an address your provider already lets you send as (a Gmail "Send mail as" address, a catch-all on your own domain, a Fastmail alias). Swanmail refuses to send from any address that is neither the account's own nor one of its aliases.

When you reply to a message that was addressed to one of your aliases, that alias is preselected.

Forwarding with attachments

Forwarding a message carries its attachments along. They appear as chips next to anything you attach yourself and can be removed one by one. Only a reference travels to the app's backend; the bytes are read from the original message when you send. Replies do not carry attachments.

Forwarding as an attachment

Forward as attachment — in the reading pane's More menu, in each message's More menu inside a conversation, and in the message list's right-click menu — opens a new message with the original attached as an .eml file named after its subject, rather than quoted into the body. The recipient gets the message exactly as it arrived, headers and all, which is what an abuse desk, a mail administrator or anyone investigating a delivery problem needs. As with ordinary forwards, only a reference travels until you press Send; the source is then downloaded from your provider and counts toward the 25 MB limit.

Inline images

Paste an image, or drop one onto the editor, to place it inline. On send, inline images become proper cid: parts of the message rather than base64 inside the HTML, so they display in every mail client and count toward the 25 MB message limit like any other attachment.

Formatting

The toolbar above the body offers bold, italic and strikethrough, headings 1 to 3 (⌘⌥1–⌘⌥3), text color and highlight from a small palette (⌘⇧H toggles a yellow highlight), bullet and numbered lists, links, tables and an emoji picker. Put the cursor in a table and Add row, Add column and Delete table appear beside the table button; Tab moves between cells. The emoji picker searches English names, and keeps the emoji you used last in a Recently used row.

Recipients see the same thing you do: on send, headings get explicit sizes, tables get borders and padding, and colors are written onto the text itself, so the formatting survives Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail, none of which read a stylesheet from a message.

Templates

Write a message, open the Templates menu in the composer's footer and choose Save as template…. Later, the same menu inserts a template's subject and body into the message you are writing. Rename or remove templates in Settings → Templates.

Send & Archive

In a reply, the menu beside Send (the arrow) starts with Send & Archive (⌘⇧↩ / Ctrl+Shift+↩). It sends the reply and then archives the message you answered, so a conversation you have dealt with leaves the Inbox in one step. The archive happens only once the reply has actually gone (or has been queued for the network); undoing the send or a failed send leaves the message where it was. To make plain Send do the same in every reply, turn on Archive after replying under Settings → Templates → Composing.

Send later

The menu beside Send also offers Send later: In 1 hour, Today 18:00, Tomorrow 09:00 and Pick a date and time. A scheduled message waits in Scheduled in the sidebar, where you can cancel it or reopen it in the composer.

Scheduled messages are delivered by Swanmail itself, so the app has to be running at the chosen time. If it was closed or the computer was asleep, the message goes out as soon as the app is running again. A message that fails to send stays in Scheduled with the error.

Sending without a connection

If there is no network when you press Send, the message is not lost and the composer does not sit there with an error: it is queued, shown under Scheduled as Waiting for network, and sent once — as soon as the connection is back. A message scheduled with Send later that comes due while you are offline waits the same way. Only connection problems are treated like this; a wrong password or a refused recipient is still reported, because retrying would not help.

The forgotten attachment

When what you wrote mentions an attachment and the message has none, Swanmail asks before sending: Send anyway or Go back. It reads only your own text — not the quoted original or your signature — and recognises the usual phrases in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Swedish. Switch it off under Settings → Templates → Composing.

Read receipts

Receipt in the footer asks the recipient's mail program to confirm when the message was read. Whether they answer is up to them.

Signing and encryption

Once you have an OpenPGP key pair, Encrypt (the lock) and Sign appear in the composer footer and apply GPG to the message, HTML or plain text; only the older inline PGP format needs plain-text mode. With an S/MIME identity imported, Sign and Encrypt switches for S/MIME appear beside it; they stay the way you leave them, so someone who signs everything sets it once.

Drafts

Drafts are saved as you type, locally and to your provider's Drafts folder, and reopen in the composer from the Drafts folder.

A draft is saved only when you change something. A reply or forward that you open and close without changes leaves no draft.

Drafts in the sidebar shows the drafts of every account (key 4). It appears only when there is a draft. Open a draft to Edit Draft or Discard draft. A discarded draft goes to the Trash, so you can get it back.

In the composer, the trash button or ⌘⇧⌫ (Ctrl+Shift+Backspace) discards the message you are writing. For a few seconds, Undo in the toast that follows brings it back as it was.

Sent

Sent in the sidebar shows the sent mail of every account (key 5). A message you send shows there a few seconds after it leaves, without a wait for the next sync.