Reading and Replying

Here's how the reading pane works and the keys that reply, forward, sign, schedule and search inside a conversation.

The reading pane

The reading pane opens the selected conversation with the newest message expanded. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to move through the list.

The More menu on the subject row opens downward with one action per row. It holds Copy Thread, Create a task from this email, Pop out email, Print, and Create PDF, along with Park, Move and Assign label. Copy Thread copies the whole conversation as plain text. Print opens your browser's print dialog, and Create PDF downloads a PDF immediately. Pop out email opens the conversation in its own browser window, where you can read it and Reply, Reply All or Forward; the reading pane keeps showing it until you pick another email. Print and PDF include every email newest first, each with its From, To, CC, BCC when present, Subject, date and time, and body. Unsent drafts are left out. Pictures appear as real pictures: the newest copy of each picture is shown, and older copies of the same picture show only the file name to keep the output small. Each email keeps its layout, headings and links, and pictures from the web are included. If a picture can't be fetched for the PDF, its description shows instead.

On desktop and mobile, Create Task, Voice AI, Find in Email and More sit together on the subject row. Every email keeps Reply, Reply All and Forward beside its sender, while its time, date and location appear together below the To row. Compose sits beside Search in the desktop top bar.

On desktop, Settings sits at the bottom of the fixed vertical action toolbar between the email list and reading pane. The = key still opens it from anywhere in mail.

The preview line in the email list comes from the newest email in that conversation, so it never shows a reply you only started writing in another mail app.

Plain-text emails keep their original line breaks and show in a narrower, easy-to-read column; formatted (HTML) emails use the full width.

Links in email content underline when you hover over them so they are easy to identify.

Attached images, PDFs, Word files, Excel files and CSV files appear below the email with Preview and Download controls and a small real-content thumbnail on their card; clicking the thumbnail opens the full preview. Images embedded in the message stay in the message instead of appearing twice; when a sender identifies one by its exact filename instead of a normal embedded-image id, WonderMail still displays it in place. Wide embedded images fill the available reading width without being clipped while always keeping their original proportions, and small icons and logos keep their original size. WonderMail quietly prepares embedded pictures for the visible emails in Inbox, Other and opened labels, but never preloads them in Spam or other mailboxes; opening any email still loads its pictures normally. Files incorrectly marked embedded by a mail provider still appear as attachments when the message does not use them. Hovering an embedded image shows two small buttons in its top-right corner: a zoom button that opens the image full size in an overlay (click anywhere or press Escape to close) and a download button that saves the image in one click. Like Gmail, emails can't download their own web fonts or borrow WonderMail's own fonts, so their text appears in your computer's standard font. Designed emails keep their own layout, colours, buttons and headings, confined to that email so they never change how WonderMail looks. Very large emails (for example ones packed with pasted pictures) open in full too: WonderMail shows their text right away with a small "Loading full email…" line, then loads the complete original from your provider, pictures included, and uses that full copy for Reply, Forward and Print. If your provider can't be reached, the text stays visible with a Retry link.

Hover over or click a sender or recipient name to open a small card. Its Copy rows copy the address, name, full Email ID or full Conversation ID. Email opens a new message addressed to that person; if another draft is open, WonderMail asks before replacing it. Edit Contact, just below it, opens the contact editor for that person. Separate Search rows find the exact address or exact display name across all your mail, including Spam and Trash; the term is loaded into the search box first, so you can edit or add to it before searching again. Right-click a From, To or Cc name and choose Edit Contact to set that person's first name, last name, cell and email; names you set are used in greetings and address suggestions, and mail sync never overwrites them. To see and edit all your contacts, press G then C (or choose Contacts in the Go to menu, in the ☰ menu at the top left, or on the phone's More screen); search by name or address, click anyone to edit them, and press Esc to return to your email.

What this means for you

Above the newest message, a slim strip appears only when AI can save you reading effort or reveal concrete value: an action, deadline, decision, commitment, risk, important fact, or a specific non-obvious implication supported by the email and your goals. Acknowledgements, thank-yous, routine confirmations, simple link sharing, obvious restatements and vague significance get no strip. When shown, the summary is up to 40 words, uses the "Who you are" and "Your goals" text in Settings, and tells you what to do: it opens with Action required: — naming exactly what to do and to whom — or No action required: followed by the single most useful fact.

When an email asks you to pick a time for an interview, meeting, call or viewing, the strip also shows up to four time buttons built from the sender's offered times — for a range of an hour or more, its start time and half an hour before its end are included. Tap one and a reply opens with a greeting and that time already written, ready for you to review and send.

When the sender offers a time window and asks you to send the invite (for example "Send over a calendar invite for whatever time works for you"), the strip instead shows a button for every half hour in that window. If no date is clear, pick one of the next three business days first; times already past are hidden. Use – and + to change the meeting length in 15-minute steps (30 minutes to start), and the Link menu to choose which saved meeting link to use; your starred link is chosen first, and Edit links… manages them. Tap a time and a reply opens saying "Great, I've attached a meeting invite for…" with your link and an attached calendar invite the guest can accept. Nothing is sent until you press Send. An Add to my calendar button also appears under the times so you can put the same meeting on your own calendar in one click.

Summaries are saved with the conversation, so opening the same email again is instant. A new reply makes the summary out of date and it is rewritten the next time you open it. New mail in Inbox and Other is summarised in the background as it arrives (checked every 5 minutes), and each check also recovers missing summaries from the last 7 days, so it is usually ready before you open it. Mail you sent yourself is skipped. If a summary is not ready yet, nothing appears while the AI decides — no spinner, and opening or moving between emails is never held up — and the strip writes itself onto the screen word by word only once there is something worth saying.

PDFs and documents attached to the newest message are read into the summary as well; images are skipped, and a document too large to read is noted at the end of the summary. When you open an email that has never been summarised, attachments are skipped for speed and the background pass picks them up.

If the main AI service is busy or down, the summary is retried once and then written by a backup AI service instead of failing. When that happens the strip ends with a quiet "written by backup AI" note. If both services fail, no strip is shown; open the email again later to retry.

Short emails get no summary strip: when the newest email's own text is under 60 words (quoted history not counted) and its verdict is not "Action required:", the strip stays hidden — the email is already the summary. Longer emails, and any "Action required:" verdict, always show the strip as usual.

Replying

R replies.

Reply always fills To with the person being answered. WonderMail completes a partially loaded conversation before choosing that person. Saved-reply restoration keeps the exact email being answered, and an untouched empty To line is repaired as soon as its sender finishes loading. Reply All includes everyone on that email, excluding your own connected addresses and removing duplicates.

Press Return on an open email to Reply All. The sender is loaded in To and every other appropriate address is loaded in CC; your own connected addresses and duplicates are excluded. Highlight text first and press Return to Reply All with that text quoted at the top — it appears in italics inside quote marks on a tinted background, with the cursor two lines below it so you can start typing right away.
Meeting invites: when an email contains a Zoom, Google Meet or Teams link with a meeting time, an Add to calendar button appears under the message. Click it to add the meeting (Apple Calendar opens directly with the event ready to add). Use the arrow beside it to choose Google Calendar, Outlook.com, Outlook for work or school, or a .ics file for Outlook desktop and other apps; WonderMail remembers your choice. Zoom and Google Calendar invites are both recognized; when the invite shows an end time it is used, otherwise meetings are added as one hour. If the email body has no meeting time but an invite file (.ics) is attached, WonderMail reads the date and time from that attachment instead. An attached invite works even without a video link, such as a scheduled phone call, and Outlook/Microsoft Teams invite files are supported. Check the time and length before saving.
With a reply or forward already open, highlight more text in the email below and press Return again: that text is added as another quote one blank line below the last line you wrote, with two blank lines under it and the cursor on the second one. Quote as many passages as you like — each one stacks below the last.
In the composer you can also highlight text and click the Quote toolbar button to apply the same italic, quote-marked, tinted block style.
The compose toolbar has a bullet-list button and a numbered-list button side by side. At the start of a new line after Return, type * then a space for an indented bullet, or 1. then a space for an indented numbered list starting at 1. These markers also work after a line break inside a paragraph; only markers you type are converted. Numbered lists keep counting on each new line. Pressing Return twice at the end of a list leaves the list and continues as normal text. The smiley button opens an emoji picker: scroll the grouped list or type in its search box, and click an emoji to drop it into your email right where your cursor is. A Recently used row at the top keeps your latest picks one click away.
While you are writing a reply or forward, each earlier email in the conversation below shows a pencil and an X in its top-right corner. The X collapses that email to a single line and leaves it out of the copy you send, and the pencil opens that email for editing with all its normal formatting, images, links, bullets and tables intact. The edit box opens as tall as the email needs, up to the space available in the window, and scrolls inside if the email is longer. Both changes affect only the copy that goes out — the stored email in your mailbox never changes, and you can undo either one from the inline link or the toast. Your removals and edits are saved with the draft, so they are still there when you reopen it; delete the draft and start a new reply and every email reappears in full.
A saved reply is never put back once you have sent an email in that conversation after it was saved: WonderMail removes that leftover copy instead. If you press Send on text identical to an email you already sent in the same conversation, WonderMail asks before sending it again, and an identical re-send never starts a new Follow-Up reminder.
Every email in the conversation has its own equally sized Reply, Reply all and Forward buttons beside the sender name. Use them to answer one particular person instead of the newest message; R, A and F still answer the newest message.
A mail check running in the background never touches what you are writing. If a new message lands in the conversation while you type, the composer header shows a quiet "New reply arrived below — your draft is untouched" note and your text, recipients and subject stay exactly as they are. A reply always stays tied to the exact email you replied to: a newer email from someone else in the same conversation never changes its To line, and when a conversation is split into one row per sender, a saved reply only comes back on the row of the email it answers. Each email in a conversation keeps its own saved reply, so replies to two different people in one conversation are both kept in Drafts. A draft is only saved once it has typed text, an image or a file; an empty reply is simply closed, and emptying a saved draft removes it from Drafts.
A replies to everyone.
F forwards.
The compose box holds only what you write. The earlier emails are shown once, in the conversation below the composer, and are attached to the copy you send — a forward carries the original under a "Forwarded message" header, a reply carries it under an "On … wrote:" line.
On desktop, keep scrolling down when you reach the bottom of your reply and WonderMail continues through the earlier emails below. Scroll upward at the top of the conversation to return to your reply.
The original email keeps its real formatting inside the forward — pictures, buttons, colours and links look the way they do when you read it, and your recipient gets the same thing. This also works when you forward an older email from a conversation or schedule the forward. Hidden styling code is removed, so you never see raw code.
C opens a blank composer. In the Tasks view, C creates a new task instead.
⌘T sends a one-tap thumbs-up reply with your default signature — useful for acknowledgements.
⌘G opens the Signatures menu. Each mailbox can have its own default signature and its own Auto-display setting; manage the signatures themselves in Settings → Signatures.
H opens the schedule-send picker so a message goes out later. Scheduled mail is listed in Settings → Scheduled.
⌘F finds text inside the open conversation, including quoted history.

Sending shows a 10-second countdown with an Undo button. Undo is the only way to stop a send — the ⌘/Ctrl-Z shortcut no longer cancels one, so an undo meant for an archive or a move can never pull back an email by accident. A stopped send puts the message back in Drafts with its original context and shows a notice naming the recipient and exactly what stopped it.

Pro Tip: ⌘T is the fastest way to clear an acknowledgement — one key sends a signed thumbs-up reply without opening the composer.

When two people reply separately

When more than one person has replied separately in the same conversation after your last message and you have not answered yet, the email list shows one row per person instead of a single combined row. Each row shows that person's name, their message and its time, and opening it — by clicking it or moving to it with the Up and Down arrow keys — shows that person's own email at the top of the reading pane, with the older emails below it and a "Show newer emails" link to reveal the rest. Reading a row never merges the others back — the separate rows stay until you reply in the conversation. Archiving or snoozing a row (E, the Archive button, a swipe, the F-keys or Z) handles only that person's row; the other rows stay in your list. A snoozed row waits in Snoozed and comes back on its own in Follow-Ups. Archiving or snoozing the last row handles the whole conversation. A new email from an archived person brings their row back. Trash, Spam, moving to Other or Future, star and labels always act on the whole conversation, because the email provider keeps it as one.

Each individual email shows Reply, Reply All and Forward beside its sender name. Your reply is threaded to that exact message; if it is a message that has not finished syncing, it is still sent and still lands in the same conversation.

Reading the row details

The location pills below the newest email's To row show where it lives, exactly like the Search result row: Snoozed or Follow-Ups when they apply, its mailbox (such as Inbox), then its labels — but only lists that actually show it, so a snoozed or Follow-Ups email shows just Snoozed or Follow-Ups. Clicking one loads that box or label in the list while leaving the open email on screen. Plain-text emails get the same treatment: their quoted history folds behind Show quoted text, flattened older replies are separated back into readable blocks, and each older email inside it has its own Prior line. Formatted emails do too: when you open quoted history holding several older emails, each one gets its own Prior line. Replies sent from WonderMail fold the same way, and older plain-text emails quoted inside them keep their line breaks. In Settings → Appearance, Prior divider line and Prior divider text set the two colours used between emails.

Pro Tip: use the location pill to jump into the label or box an email came from without losing the email you are reading.

If the newest message in a thread is a bounce or delivery-failure notice, the row shows a red "Delivery failed" badge.