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]