Emails and folders

[Dualvansmommy]

I have Mojave’s in my 2017 iMac. I have 3 email accounts set up and I’ve created folders in one of my email accounts.

I’d like to know how to get any of incoming email to be send to appropriate folder. As of now it just gets send to my main email account. I have folders for kids sports, emails related to trips, folders for my subscriptions, and so on. Any emails relating to sports, school, etc don’t get send to their corresponding folder.

Any way I can do it?? Or do I have to manually move each email to corresponding folder?

 

[jpn]

hi

great question.
fortunately, macOS Mail has a robust set of Mail Rules that you can use to store both your incoming and outgoing mail in.

in Mail/Preferences/Rules you will find the way to do it.
its rather intuitive so i don't think you will have much problems.

here are a couple of hints to make sure the Rules you set up work in the way you intended.
- the order of the individual, separate rules you make is important. rules that appear first get acted upon first
- at the end of each rule, depending on the way you have set up yr parameters within it, its often helpful/necessary to make the final action of each rule be "Stop evaluating rules", this is so rules coming later dont further make any impact on that mail.
- rules work the easiest and best when sending / receiving mail addresses are known, so using mail addresses is the best if it can work that way,
- but a lot of times you can also use certain phrases that would appear in mail to also separate them into storage folders
it of course can generate movements into folders you dont intend, but depending on the word/phrase it can work quite well
- you can also color code your mail based on rules, to make, for example, school related mail blue; travel related mail orange, etc.
- lastly, the only non-automatic thing you then have to do, after you set up yr rules is that for Outgoing mail that you send, its normally kept in your Sent mailbox. you need to physically take your cursor and do a Command All and highlight them and then click "Apply Rules" and then these too get sorted according to your rules.
Incoming mail gets sorted automatically without need for any manual action.
- lastly, i think you are aware, but when you make Folders, these are Folders that are kept locally on yr mac.
these folders are not also in yr iOS iPhone mail. you can make these same Folders on ur iOS mail, but, the thing is, there are no rules in iOS mail, except those that you can make in the icloud.com site to put mail you download on yr iPhone into these same folders as on yr mac. meaning: where you are actually placing these folders is important: are you making these Folders locally on yr mac? or, are you making these Folders on a network server.

for me, which only means for the way i work and use my devices, my set up is that i use iPhone to read mail. i dont store anything in the cloud.
whenever i open my macOS Mail, it downloads the once read (on iPhone) mail to my mac Mail and the rules then separate and store the Mail into my locally created storage folders.
the way you work and need to use Mail may be different.
i have over 100 rules and about 10 years of Mail and about 80 Folders that works really well as above.

 

[Dualvansmommy]

hi

great question.
fortunately, macOS Mail has a robust set of Mail Rules that you can use to store both your incoming and outgoing mail in.

in Mail/Preferences/Rules you will find the way to do it.
its rather intuitive so i don't think you will have much problems.

here are a couple of hints to make sure the Rules you set up work in the way you intended.
- the order of the individual, separate rules you make is important. rules that appear first get acted upon first
- at the end of each rule, depending on the way you have set up yr parameters within it, its often helpful/necessary to make the final action of each rule be "Stop evaluating rules", this is so rules coming later dont further make any impact on that mail.
- rules work the easiest and best when sending / receiving mail addresses are known, so using mail addresses is the best if it can work that way,
- but a lot of times you can also use certain phrases that would appear in mail to also separate them into storage folders
it of course can generate movements into folders you dont intend, but depending on the word/phrase it can work quite well
- you can also color code your mail based on rules, to make, for example, school related mail blue; travel related mail orange, etc.
- lastly, the only non-automatic thing you then have to do, after you set up yr rules is that for Outgoing mail that you send, its normally kept in your Sent mailbox. you need to physically take your cursor and do a Command All and highlight them and then click "Apply Rules" and then these too get sorted according to your rules.
Incoming mail gets sorted automatically without need for any manual action.
- lastly, i think you are aware, but when you make Folders, these are Folders that are kept locally on yr mac.
these folders are not also in yr iOS iPhone mail. you can make these same Folders on ur iOS mail, but, the thing is, there are no rules in iOS mail, except those that you can make in the icloud.com site to put mail you download on yr iPhone into these same folders as on yr mac. meaning: where you are actually placing these folders is important: are you making these Folders locally on yr mac? or, are you making these Folders on a network server.

for me, which only means for the way i work and use my devices, my set up is that i use iPhone to read mail. i dont store anything in the cloud.
whenever i open my macOS Mail, it downloads the once read (on iPhone) mail to my mac Mail and the rules then separate and store the Mail into my locally created storage folders.
the way you work and need to use Mail may be different.
i have over 100 rules and about 10 years of Mail and about 80 Folders that works really well as above.

Thank you! ever so helpful. I implemented what you suggested, and it's working so far for me. I need it the same in my iPhone and iPad as not always on my iMac. So I created new folders in my cloud so it'll sync across all devices. I also added rules and color coded them, but there's still a few that missed their way to correct folder.

My question is about the smart mailbox. I like it as it automatically send my messages to correct place according to my rules in place, but it won't show in my phone or iPad. just the iMac. Is there a way I can make it work across all devices with smart mailboxes??