Signing out of mac mail

Question

I haven't seen any discussion on this in recent posts. Only from a couple years back. But is it still really the case that the only way to keep my Mac Mail from being public is to have multiple user accounts and then sign out of my user account each time I leave the computer to ensure that no one else looks at my mail?
Right now, we have basically one user account. And we don't sign in or out of it. I use Facebook? I sign in and then sign out and go on my merry way. Someone else comes along and wants to use their gmail? Same thing.
But this becomes a major hassle if I want to use Mac Mail. We actually have to have multiple user accounts just to keep our mac mail private from one another? And then each of us has to be signing in and out from those user accounts constantly just to use the computer? Seems like a humongous hassle and a major reason to not bother with Mac Mail. Maybe useful for folks who have a computer that they and only they use. But for those of us who actually have computers that are shared, that's a big-time deal-breaker.

Answer 1

Howdy jumpcuts,
The best way to keep information such as mail private between multiple users of a computer is to have a separate user account for each user. This allows each user to maintain their settings and preferences for all applications such as Mail, web browsers used for FaceBook, etc. See this article for information on how to set up new user accounts -
OS X Yosemite: Set up users on your Mac
An alternative would be to create a Guest User account and use a web browser to access email accounts. Guest account settings are not saved between logins. See that same article.
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L