The main window has four panes reachable by pressing F6 to cycle forward or Shift+F6 to cycle backward:
You can also jump directly to any pane:
| Shortcut | Destination |
|---|---|
Ctrl+1 |
Account list |
Ctrl+2 |
Folder tree |
Ctrl+3 |
Message list |
Ctrl+9 |
Status bar |
Select All Inboxes at the top of the folder tree to see messages from all accounts merged into one list, sorted by date. The same All Mail group also holds All Drafts, All Sent, and All Trash, each merging that kind of folder across every account; All Archive, which follows each account’s own archive setting; All Flagged, which collects flagged messages from every folder rather than from one kind of folder; and Watched Conversations, described below.
In any of these merged views, each row also says which folder the message came from — qualified with the account name when the view spans more than one account, so “Work, Archive” and “Home, Archive” are told apart. In an ordinary single-folder view the folder is already known, so nothing extra is said. You can move where this falls in the row, or turn it off, in Message List Fields.
When a conversation matters — a release announcement, a bug thread, a trip itinerary — you can watch it, and every message in it collects in one place, including the replies that have not arrived yet.
Press Ctrl+Shift+W on any message in the conversation,
or choose Message → Watch Conversation. You will hear
“Watching conversation” and the subject. From then on, Watched
Conversations — the last item in the All Mail
group of the folder tree — lists every message in that conversation,
from every folder and every account, newest first. New replies join on
their own as they arrive; you do not have to mark them.
This is what makes watching different from flagging. A flag marks a message you already have, so you have to notice each new one first. A watch is a standing subscription to the conversation, so the ones you have not seen yet are already collected for you.
To stop watching, press Ctrl+Shift+W again on any
message in the conversation — the same key does both. If you are in the
Watched Conversations folder at the time, that conversation’s messages
leave the list straight away and the selection moves to the next
message. Watching changes nothing on the mail server and nothing in
other mail programs; it is remembered on this computer only.
Everything else in the message list works here as usual: view modes, filters, sorting, and the message list fields. Conversations view mode is a natural fit — each watched conversation becomes a single group you can expand. You can also save Watched Conversations as one of your own views, the same way you would save any other folder.
Two things worth knowing. QuickMail groups a conversation by its
subject, ignoring any Re: and Fwd: prefixes,
so a reply is recognised automatically — but two unrelated messages that
happen to share a subject count as one conversation. And a message with
no subject at all cannot be watched; if you try, you will hear “Cannot
watch a conversation with no subject” and nothing changes.
If you would like each row to say whether its conversation is watched, turn on the Watched field in Message List Fields. It is off to begin with.
To see what you are watching, choose Tools → Watched Conversations…. The window lists every watch with how many cached messages it has collected and when you started it. Press Enter on one to jump to that conversation, Delete to stop watching it, or Rename to give it a clearer label. Renaming changes the label only — which messages the watch collects is decided by the subject and does not change. Type a letter to jump down the list. The window stays open while you work, so you can leave it up and keep going; Escape closes it.
To be told when a reply arrives, turn on Settings → Notifications → Show a notification when a watched conversation gets a reply. Unlike the ordinary new-mail notification, this one applies to every folder rather than just the inbox, because a watched thread’s next message can land anywhere. The two settings are independent; if a message is both new inbox mail and part of a watched conversation you get one notification, the watched one.
To narrow any folder to watched mail, choose View → Filter → Watched. That works in any folder, and can be saved as part of one of your own views.
In the folder tree, the message list, and the Conversations, From, and To trees, type the first letter of what you want to reach and the selection jumps to the next item starting with that letter. Keep typing to narrow it — letters typed within about a second of each other build up a longer prefix, so “arc” reaches Archive rather than stopping at Address book. Pause, and the next letter starts a fresh prefix. Pressing the same letter repeatedly steps through every item beginning with it, and the search wraps around to the top when it runs off the end.
What each list matches is the text you would expect to hear first: the folder name in the folder tree (only folders currently expanded into view), the sender in the message list — or the subject when a message has no sender — the conversation subject in Conversations, and the person’s name in the From and To trees.
The same typing works in the Go to Folder picker, in the address book’s contact, group, and member lists, and in the Message List Fields window.
Create a new folder in any of these ways:
The new folder is created under the folder currently selected in the folder tree, or under the account root when a header or nothing is selected.
Select a folder in the folder tree, press Shift+F10, and choose Move Folder… or Copy Folder…. Both open a picker showing the same hierarchical tree used in the folder panel — folders nested under their parent, everything already expanded. Arrow to the folder you want the selected folder to live under and press Enter. Copying brings the folder’s messages and any subfolders with it.
Typing jumps to a folder here as it does in the folder tree: type the beginning of a folder name and the selection moves to it. Because a bare letter belongs to that typing, the picker’s buttons take Alt+O for Open and Alt+C for Cancel. Enter and Escape work as usual. There is no New Folder button in this picker — create the folder first, then move into it.
Two things the picker leaves out on purpose:
The picker opens on the folder you came from. Since the folder you are moving is not one of the destinations, it opens on the folder that one currently sits under, so you start where you were rather than at the top of the list. For a top-level folder there is no such parent, and it opens on the first folder instead.
Because it opens there, pressing Enter straight away would put the folder back where it started. QuickMail says so rather than doing it — as it does for messages already in the folder you picked.
If those two exclusions leave nowhere to go — an account whose only folder is the one you are moving — QuickMail says so instead of opening an empty picker. The same happens if you choose Move or Copy Folder on a view rather than a folder: All Inboxes, All Mail, and the per-account All Mail entries look like folders in the tree but are collections of messages from several folders, so there is nothing to move.
Select one or more messages (or a sender/recipient group, or a conversation) and choose Move to Folder… or Copy to Folder… from the context menu (Shift+F10) or the command palette. Both open a folder picker showing the same hierarchical tree used in the main folder panel — folders nested under their parent, with account names as headers when more than one account is present. Arrow through the tree and press Enter to complete the move or copy. If you need a destination that does not exist yet, activate New Folder (or Alt+N) in the picker to create one under the selected folder and move into it without leaving the dialog.
The picker opens on the folder you last filed to, so filing several messages to the same place takes one keystroke after the first: open the picker, press Enter. Move and copy are remembered separately — copying to a reference folder does not change where Move to Folder opens — and each account keeps its own, since a folder on one account is not a destination for another.
Before you have moved anything on that account, and whenever the remembered folder is no longer there — you have deleted or renamed it — the picker opens on the folder the messages are in instead, so you still start somewhere useful. The same applies when the messages you selected come from more than one account: no single remembered folder is right for all of them.
Only the folder you choose in the picker is remembered. Archiving and deleting file messages away too, but they do not change where the picker opens. In a combined view such as All Inboxes that is the message’s own folder, not the view. If neither is available the picker opens on the first folder; it never opens with nothing selected.
Typing jumps to a folder here too, exactly as it does in the main folder tree: type the beginning of a folder name and the selection moves to it. Because a bare letter belongs to that typing, the picker’s buttons take Alt+O for Open, Alt+C for Cancel, and Alt+N for New Folder rather than plain letter shortcuts. Enter and Escape still work as usual.
Press Ctrl+Shift+V (or use the View
menu) to switch how messages are grouped:
Folders do not all want the same treatment. An inbox reads well grouped into Conversations; a folder full of receipts that all share one subject reads terribly that way — it collapses into a single conversation of a hundred messages.
So QuickMail remembers. Change the view mode, filter, or sort in a folder and that folder opens that way from then on, including after a restart. Set your inbox to Conversations and your receipts folder to Messages once, and each stays put.
A folder you have never changed follows the Display mode in Settings → General, which also tracks the last choice you made anywhere. So the first time you open a new folder it looks like the last folder you set up — change it once and it is that folder’s own setting from then on.
To hand a folder back to the default, use Reset Folder View from the View → Views menu or the command palette. QuickMail confirms with “Folder view reset.”
To turn the whole behaviour off, clear Remember view settings for each folder in Settings → General. The view mode and sort then apply to every folder at once, as they did before. Your per-folder settings are kept, so switching it back on restores them.
View → Density sets how much space each message row takes: Comfortable (the default) leaves room around each row, Compact tightens them so more messages fit on screen. The change applies at once and is remembered. The same choice is in Settings → Appearance under Message List Density, and Density: Comfortable and Density: Compact are in the command palette.
Density changes spacing only. What a row says, and what a screen reader reports about it, is identical either way — that is set in Message List Fields.
Press Ctrl+Shift+S to open the search box. Type your
query and press Enter. Results appear in the message list. Press Escape
to clear the search and return to the full folder.
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to search folder names. Type to
filter the tree, press Enter to navigate to the matching folder.
Press F5 to manually refresh the current folder.
Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command palette. Type any part of a command name to find it. Press Enter to run it. This is the fastest way to discover and run any action in the app.
Open File → Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts to reassign any shortcut to a different key. Select a command’s field and press the key combination you want — QuickMail captures it, shows you what it heard, and asks you to confirm with OK, pick another with Change, or Cancel. If the combination is already assigned to something else, a warning names the existing command so you can decide whether to reassign it. Changes take effect immediately and survive restarts.
Bare keys as shortcuts. You can assign a shortcut with no modifier key using Delete, Backspace, Insert, or any function key (F1–F24) — for example, bare Delete to delete a message, or F5 to sync. (Bare Delete ships as a default binding for exactly this reason.) Plain letters, digits, and the Spacebar cannot be bound on their own — they would swallow ordinary typing — so pair them with Ctrl, Alt, or Shift. Enter, Escape, and Tab are reserved for navigating dialogs and are never captured as shortcuts.
QuickMail checks for a newer release in the background each time it starts. The top entry of the Help menu always shows the result: “No updates available — running version X.Y.Z” when you are current, or “Update available: vX.Y.Z” when a newer release exists. If an update is found, a spoken announcement follows a few seconds after launch; the background check itself is silent when you are already up to date.
Installed copies download and install updates automatically, and both that behavior and its notifications are configurable — see Installing and Updating QuickMail for the full walkthrough.
The portable exe does not update itself. If you run
the standalone QuickMail.exe, the Help menu entry still
tells you when a new version exists; activating it opens the releases
page, and updating remains a manual download of the new exe.
The Help menu also has a Keyboard Tutorial entry, a short interactive walkthrough of core navigation (F6 pane cycling, Ctrl+1/2/3, the command palette, and Escape) for anyone new to the app.
Choose Report a Bug from the Help menu (also available from the command palette) to open a report window without needing a GitHub account. Fill in a summary and, optionally, what happened, what you expected, and steps to reproduce; a Preview box always shows exactly what will be sent. Press Send to file it directly, or Copy report and open GitHub to submit it under your own GitHub account.
This is one of three ways to report a problem. See Reporting Issues for all three — including email — and guidance on which to choose.