In Snow Leopard holding option–up arrow (for > 1s) will select the first message and option–down arrow will select the last message in Mail.app (see: What Is the Keyboard Shortcut for Moving to Last Message in Mac OS X Mail.app?) but this no longer works in Lion. Does anyone know if there is a new shortcut?
Mac – the Keyboard Shortcut for Moving to the First/Last Message in Mail.app in Mac OS X Lion
apple-mailkeyboard shortcutsmacosx lion
Best Answer
Unfortunately, I can only offer workarounds...
You can deselect all messages e.g. by clicking the empty area if the list doesn't fill all vertical space, then press
ArrowUp
to select the last messageArrowDown
to select the first messageTo get the last message, press
Cmd-A, Shift-ArrowUp, ArrowDown
.If you don't use Mail's full screen mode, you can do the following:
Open Automator and create a new Service that receives no input in Mail. From the Utilities library, add a Run AppleScript action by double-clicking. Then use the following script code:
This script has been developed for the new three-column view. If you use the classic pre-Lion view, remove "
of first group
" from that script.Save as Select first row and assign a keyboard shortcut, e.g.
Option-UpArrow
, in System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Services.Create a new Service and repeat this, but replace
first row
bylast row
and name it Select last row.These services will only be available in Mail, and select the first and last row respectively when you press the assigned keyboard shortcuts.
An alternative AppleScript, that works even in full screen mode and doesn't require the Accessibility API (UI scripting):
Replace
last item
byfirst item
for the first list element. Again, create two Services and assign keyboard shortcuts.If you are in threaded view, select View » Expand all Conversations first, as single messages that are part of a thread cannot be selected, and it cannot easily be determined which messages belong to a thread.
The alternative script below will select the bottom-most non-threaded message in the list, bounded by 50 attempts to not run forever: