Jul 04, 2020 Customize Mail rules – Create smart rules for automatic tagging of new messages. Mail search integration – Search your tags from Mail’s search field. Narrow the search by keywords, projects or notes. Smart Mailbox integration – Build smart mailboxes for searching your messages by keywords, projects, and due dates.
On 43folders, his 'site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better,' Merlin Mann talks about the smart mailbox feature in Apple's Mail application. I'm a pretty heavy Mail.app user user myself, so this caught my eye. However, before delving into smart mailboxes, first a few words about filtering mail with rules in Mail.
What Is Smart Mailbox Mac
I'm subscribed to several dozen mailing lists, some of which I only read from time to time. To avoid having messages from these lists clutter up my inbox, I have a different folder for each list. This is easily accomplished in Mail with rules that move messages addressed to a certain address, or with certain mailing list headers, to an appropriate folder. (For reasons that I won't get into right now, I do this filtering in Mail.app when I'm online and with procmail on the server when I'm not online, let me know if you want to see this explained.)
Smart folders are much like rules, except that rules move the message to a different folder if that is the action for the rule, while smart mailboxes show all messages that satisfy a condition or set of conditions, without moving the messages. The message automatically disappears from the smart mailbox when it stops satisfying the set of conditions—that would be the 'smart' part. So rules are appropriate when you want to physically move messages out of your inbox, while smart mailboxes are good to show you a selection of what's in your inbox and/or other folders.
Have a look at Merlin's article for some great examples of how to use smart mailboxes. One that I used for a while was a smart mailbox that matched all messages where 'any recipient' contains my email address, the message is not in my Junk mailbox, and the message is unread. This was extremely useful to make sure I didn't miss any messages in those mailing list folders that were addressed to me as part of an ongoing discussion. However, because Mail.app had to search through all my folders to find messages that satisfied these rules, Mail became a lot slower, especially when first retrieving my overnight mail in the morning, so I'm not using this smart mailbox any longer.
Smart Mailboxes In Mac Mail App Free
Finally, a Mail.app tip from me to you: if you work with folders, and you want to see messages from several of those at the same time, you can simply select multiple folders at the same time by command-clicking them. That's Apple speak for clicking on one folder, holding down the Apple (command) key, and clicking on additional folders.