Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started experiementing with smart folders in Mail.app. I created one for unread spam (for quick review), another for the last 7 days of mail in my inbox, another for all unread messages, etc.
After not really using these most of the time, I determined what I really wanted was to have a view of the items in my inbox from the last 7 days along with all of my unread items in all folders (I have a couple of rules that route messages to folders without marking them as read – SVN commit e-mails for example). There doesn’t seem to be a way to group rules – ((this and this) or (this)) – in the smart folder interface, however there is a clever1 workaround.
You can specify ‘message is in Smart Mailbox A’ as criteria for a smart mailbox, so you can set up a mailbox for each ‘group’ of criteria, then “and” and “or” them together into another smart mailbox.
A bit clunky? Yes. But I’ve got the view I want of my mail and I’m quite happy about it.
- Or clumsy, depending on your POV. [back]
That sounds similar to how I’ve learned to use iTunes’ smart playlists.
I’ve got smart playlists for “100 Least Recently Listened”, “100 Least Frequently Played”, “50 Highest Rated”, and “50 Random”. Then I combine all of those into a combined list called “The Good Mix”, which is sorted randomly.
Regarding the Smart Mailbox which displays only Unread Messages, I thought about doing that, but didn’t because I thought that as soon as I selected an email from that list, it would be marked “Read” and disappear from sight, before I had a chance to read it.
I guess I should try it and see how it really works.
Is this a new feature in Tiger or have I just completely missed it? (I haven’t upgraded yet…) It sounds like smart folders are exactly what I need.
Yep.
Check out this hint: http://www.macosxhin[...]617170909739