This past week Kali and I had to swap a number of emails with very large attachments—up to 19MB. That’s at the upper limit of what our mail server can handle. If the attachments were much larger, we’d use our public iDisk folder, included with MobileMe, or Dropbox to exchange the files. However, time was of the essence and email was the easiest way to exchange and keep track of the files we were working on.
These emails often took 45 seconds and longer to send. It was frustrating not knowing how much longer they’d be sitting in the Outbox. Luckily, Kali reminded me that OS X Mail has an Activity Window that shows the status of incoming and outgoing emails. Instead of simply wondering how much longer it would take to send email, I could now see how far along outgoing email was as a percentage.
To open this Activity window in Mail, simply hold down the Command and 0 (zero) keys at the same time. (Mail has to be open and active for this to work.) You can also navigate to the the menu bar in Mail and select Activity.