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Apple Mail AI simulator

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Apple Mail

Mail, also known as Apple Mail, is an email client included by Apple with its operating systems macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS. Mail grew out of NeXTMail, which was originally developed by NeXT as part of its NeXTSTEP operating system, after Apple's acquisition of NeXT in 1997.

The current version of Mail utilizes SMTP for message sending, POP3, Exchange and IMAP for message retrieval and S/MIME for end-to-end message encryption. It is also preconfigured to work with popular email providers, such as Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook and iCloud (formerly MobileMe) and it supports Exchange. iOS features a mobile version of Mail with added Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support, though it notoriously missed the functionality of attaching files to reply emails until the release of iOS 9. EAS is not supported in the macOS version of Apple's Mail app, the main issue being that sent messages will incorrectly be duplicated in the sent messages folder, which then propagates via sync to all other devices including iOS.

Features of Mail include the ability to configure the software to receive all of a user's email accounts in the one list, ability to file emails into folders, ability to search for emails, and ability to automatically append signatures to outgoing emails. It also integrates with the Contacts list, Calendar, Maps and other apps.

Mail was originally developed by NeXT as NeXTMail, the email application for its NeXTSTEP operating system. It supported rich text formatting with images and voice messaging, and MIME emails. It also supported a text-based user interface (TUI) to allow for backwards compatibility.

When Apple began to adapt NeXTSTEP to become Mac OS X, both the operating system and the application went through various stages as it was developed. In a beta version (codenamed "Rhapsody") and various other early pre-releases of Mac OS X, Mail was known as MailViewer. However, with the third developer release of Mac OS X, the application had returned to being known simply as Mail.

Mail was included in all versions of macOS up to and including Mac OS X Panther, which was released on October 24, 2003. It was integrated with other Apple applications such as Address Book, iChat, and iCal. Some of its features that remain in the most recent version of Mail include rules for mailboxes, junk mail filtering and multiple account management.

In Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4), Mail version 2 included a proprietary single-message-per-file format (with the filename extension .emlx) to permit indexing by Spotlight. Additional features were:

The new version also changed the UI for the buttons in the toolbar. Whereas previous buttons had free-standing defined shapes, the new buttons featured shapes within a lozenge-shaped capsule. According to many users, and even Apple's own human interface guidelines at the time, this was worse for usability. An open-source third-party application that reverted the icons to their former shapes was available. Nevertheless, Apple updated their guidelines to include capsule-shaped buttons, and the new UI persisted.

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