⇥ Quickie: add lists to your e-mails in Mail.app

Yes, you can do it. Here’s how.

Mail.app has a frustratingly minimalistic interface. Most of the time, that’s a great thing—simpler is easier to use. Sometimes, though, I can’t help but wondering why—oh, why—some things that are so obviously useful seem to be completely missing.

One such thing is the ability to add lists to a mail message… by default, there seemingly is no way to do it.

Well, except for the fact it’s right there in the menus:

Format Menu

That’s right… I’m not sure how I missed it, but you can create both ordered and unordered lists from this menu. Of course, that’s hardly a user-friendly way of getting access to this function; luckily, however, you can simply add the same functionality to your toolbar by customizing it—so, for example, mine looks like this:

Toolbar can haz lists

This is a bit better—at least I don’t have to go all the way up to the menu, but it’s not quite what I want—you see, I use a lot of lists in my e-mails. So, I decided to create a dedicated shortcut, which, luckily, is exceedingly easy.

All you need to do is go to System Preferences ➡ Keyboard ➡ Keyboard Shortcuts ➡ Application Shortcuts, click on the add button, choose Mail.app from the and type the appropriate bits in the resulting dialogue box:

You can do the same for ordered lists