What’s the difference?īasically, if you have a lot of smart mailboxes of varied purposes, you can create a folder in which to compile similar smart mailboxes in one place. You may have noticed in the first screenshot, there are two new smart mailbox options: New Smart Mailbox and New Smart Mailbox Folder. The Difference Between Smart Mailbox and Smart Mailbox Folders This is a good, non-destructive way of organizing your e-mail, thus allow you to rest assured you can find specific messages quickly and easily. So, you can set up smart mailboxes for all types of purposes, whether it’s for work, personal, or something else, and they won’t be altered in any way. These messages are now “herded” into a single mailbox without leaving the inbox. This means that each message must meet all the requirements to be part of the mailbox. In this example, we’re going to create a smart mailbox in which messages have been both replied to and flagged. Let’s create another simple smart mailbox so you get the idea. As you can see from the following screenshot, any work-related e-mails appear in our newly-created smart mailbox. When you’re done, you can find your smart mailbox in the sidebar, in the section labeled “Smart Mailboxes”. For example, messages won’t be flagged, colored, or anything to change the message’s appearance, they’ll simply be gathered according to criteria stipulated in the smart mailbox rule. Further, messages won’t be affected such as they can be with rules. In this way, we don’t have to search through our inbox for these message or move them. This particular rule is easy, all we are doing is creating a mailbox where messages “from” work people can be found. For this rule to work correctly, the messages must match “any” of the condition set forth. Now, Mail's Inbox already ignores moved messages, which can be confusing to some users.Next, it’s time to build our rule, which works much like it does with actual Mail rules. If you don't care about the messages from list services or other publications, you can create a rule to move them to a folder and then have the Smart Mailbox ignore them for the count. This makes the dock unread count badge much more useful for me.
Hello?!?)įor most of my other mailboxes, it is sufficient to check them once in a while, but I do not want them to show in the Dock unread count. (I don't know why Apple insists on calling folders in Mail.app "mailboxes." After all, the icon is a folder. So, Cran created a Smart Mailbox that looked in certain folders. Rather, he/she was concerned about certain messages. Under the General tab in Mail Preferences, there's a number of selections available for the count: All Mailboxes (providing the count of all unread messages in all folders and subfolders), Inbox only (providing the count of messages in the primary mailboxes but not those moved by rules), and any Smart Mailboxes that you've created.Ĭran didn't care about listing or counting all unread messages. The Dock counter is customizable in Mail.app. The tip in question was on from reader Cran, who wanted to customize the Dock badge, which enumerates the unread messages in the Mailbox. The nice thing about this is that messages aren't moved, but you can interact with them as if they were in your primary Inbox. Mail.app lets users create rule-based Smart Mailboxes that can dynamically show messages located in other mailboxes.
It really can make using Mac Mail more convenient. A recent tip shows how smart Mac Mail's dynamic Smart Mailbox feature can be.