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Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
#41770 09/17/16 09:44 PM
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kevs Offline OP
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Two important questions with Mail:

I cannot seem to find a way to know how many email I've selected. How do you know the quantity of emails you select?

Also, I like to drag emails to an external hardrive and desktop to work on later, for some reason Mail does not seem to allow this in groups? You can only drag one email at a time off to a hardrive or new folder? It's very tedious. Any help with that great appreciated. Thanks.

Last edited by dianne; 09/17/16 09:53 PM. Reason: Moved from the Mac OS X Applications forum.
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41773 09/17/16 09:59 PM
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kevs,

I have moved your questions about Mail to this "Networking" forum as per the description on the FineTunedMac forum list.


Back up everything you can't afford to lose: documents, mail, movies, music, photos, and other data and settings.
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41776 09/18/16 07:23 AM
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El Cap/Mail 9.3 (3124)

I think this screenshot answers your questions.

In the top image you can see that selecting n emails, clicking, and moving your cursor out of the blue area (including to the toolbar) calls up the little envelope with the number of emails selected. (I don't understand why you haven't seen this already.)

The middle image shows that you can apparently drag n emails to your desktop, but the bottom image shows that only one of n selected is actually moved, which I suspect is a bug in Mail.

Please post back if I've missed the mark.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
artie505 #41804 09/19/16 05:16 PM
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Thanks Artie, the problem is that number when you drag includes all the conversations with everyone so it's not an accurate number. Anyway to get an accurate number?

You are saying there is no way then to drag multiple emails to desktop?

Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41813 09/20/16 07:03 AM
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Hmmm... Under Mail > View there's an option to "Organize by Conversation"; de-selecting it may resolve your "number" problem, but it may introduce new, more intrusive issues at the same time.

As for dragging multiple emails to desktop, the number of emails I drag appears correctly, and with no "prohibited" sign, so it looks like the operation will complete as expected, but I never find more than one email on my desktop.

In my eyes that's a bug that will maybe be corrected in Sierra (Maybe joemike will test.), and if it's not, a bug report can be filed.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
artie505 #41825 09/20/16 04:02 PM
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ARtie, I cannot drag more than one at a time, that's why I'm posting.

Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41828 09/20/16 04:12 PM
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I already responded to your question, kevs: Feedback - Mac OS X - Apple

Edit: Wait! Are you saying that you can't even drag multiple emails as in the middle image in my screenshot? If that's the case, refer again to the above link, but I doubt that Apple will address bugs such as these in El Cap with Sierra on the horizon.

Edit 2: Maybe it's got something to do with conversations?

Last edited by artie505; 09/20/16 04:23 PM.

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41836 09/20/16 06:59 PM
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FYI, I just ran a quick test in Mail 10.0 in Sierra and the number selected was correctly shown once I started dragging, but only a single file appeared when I dropped them on the desktop. When I clicked on it that file opened in Mail but it was essentially a screen shot of the Mail window with the stacked open messages and could not be edited nor could the underlying messages be opened or read. in other words, pretty much useless. I could however successfully drag multiple messages and drop them on another mailbox with expected results.

Curious, I tried the same test in Airmail 3. It gave the correct count of selected messages once I started dragging them, but I could not drop the messages on the desktop. I could however print the selected messages and while I did not actually print there were 12 pages going to the printer.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
joemikeb #41837 09/20/16 07:24 PM
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Thanks Joe,
So for selecting and getting a perfect accurate count: is this achievable? Is seems Mail adds the redundant conversations- so the count is higher than reality.

And is it achievable to select 5 emails to the desktop at once? The project is I have an apprentice, I need to give multiple emails to extract info from and she is having to drag them one at a time (tediously)

Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41839 09/20/16 08:24 PM
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FWIW I can think of some possible alternatives you might try…
  • If the apprentice has her own computer or email address simply forward the appropriate messages to her. In Mail 10 you can forward them either as a single email or as attachments to a new email using options in the context menu.
  • In Airmail 3, you can program an "action" that would forward an email or a batch of emails with a single keystroke.
  • You could select a group of messages press ⌘P and choose print to PDF and pass the single PDF fie along to the apprentice.
FOOTNOTE: In Mail 10 if you forward messages as a single email the individual headings are lost but if you send them as attachments the headers go along as well.

Last edited by joemikeb; 09/20/16 09:53 PM. Reason: Add Footnote

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41840 09/20/16 08:40 PM
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Have you tried de-selecting "Conversations" as per my post #41813?


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
artie505 #41842 09/20/16 09:55 PM
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kevs Offline OP
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Artie, that seems to work that. Would be better if there was a preference to organize by conversation, but one could not have that screw up to see quantity selected, right?

And the number of images in a folder seem to be accurate now. For years, that folder number was not accurate.

Joe, Thanks. Points:
1) Mail says 9.3. Should it say 10? Forwarding 60 emails as a groups seems to work, though the look is only text, she wont see the images and nice formatting I don't think... And would that be a huge slow email out?

2) Airdrop, can I quickly drag Mail emails into Airdrop for just t his isolated use? I'm probably not going to change email clients.

3) PDF, seems to work, my test created a 25 page pdf for just 5 emails, but mind have a lot of images and logos.

Any idea why one cannot drag multiples in Mail?



Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41843 09/20/16 10:32 PM
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Originally Posted By: kevs

1) Mail says 9.3. Should it say 10? Forwarding 60 emails as a groups seems to work, though the look is only text, she wont see the images and nice formatting I don't think... And would that be a huge slow email out?

2) Airdrop, can I quickly drag Mail emails into Airdrop for just t his isolated use? I'm probably not going to change email clients.

3) PDF, seems to work, my test created a 25 page pdf for just 5 emails, but mind have a lot of images and logos.

Any idea why one cannot drag multiples in Mail?

  1. I said Mail 10 because I am running MacOS 12 Sierra Beta and that includes Mail 10. YOu on the other hand are still in El Capitan with Mail 9.3. No huge noticeable differences that I can tell.
  2. I haven't tested Airdrop in this situation, but I see no obvious reason it would not work. Admittedly 60 emails whould make a big message whether they were one message or attachments.
  3. The number of PDF pages is a function of the number of pages in the email or the length of the individual emails. In other words whether you print to a printer or a PDF it should end up the same number of pages. In fact on a Mac everything you see on the screen or on a printed output page was generated by PDF. Graphics will definitely increase the total size of the message in Bytes.
  4. Not to be flippant but probably either the code in Mail or the OS X API does not support it.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
joemikeb #41844 09/20/16 11:36 PM
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kevs Offline OP
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Thanks Joe, we'll it's not logical when you cannot select multiple items in general right? So it's puzzling.

Thanks for these tips!

Re: Mail: How many have I selected? And can I drag
kevs #41868 09/22/16 08:55 AM
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Originally Posted By: kevs
Artie, that seems to work that. Would be better if there was a preference to organize by conversation, but one could not have that screw up to see quantity selected, right?

And the number of images in a folder seem to be accurate now. For years, that folder number was not accurate.

Glad to hear that my suggestion helped...even if it wasn't a panacea.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire

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