For a while now, we’ve been able to perform certain actions on iOS email by swiping from side to side on messages.
With El Capitan, though, that ability has been brought to OS X, and I dig it. Here’s how it works: If you open Mail and find a message you’d like to deal with from your list, you can swipe from right to left with two fingers to get a quick option to trash it.
Alternatively, swiping from left to right will let you mark it as read or unread:
With iOS, we’ve got a few options for how to customize what swiping does (and you can check out Jeff Gamet’s TMO article on doing just that if you’re curious), but with El Cap, there’s only a single choice. Select Mail> Preferences first to get to it:
Once the Preferences window opens, pick the “Viewing” tab. Within that, you’ll see the “Swipe Left To” drop-down; there you can switch that gesture from “Trash” to “Archive” if you’d prefer.
I use those iOS gestures all the time, so I’m sure I’ll enjoy this addition. I really do wish, though, that we had more customization options. Can you imagine how handy it would be to be able to swipe left to automagically file an email in a specified folder? The mind boggles.