Mail Application Help!

[araah]

Hi guys, thought id put this in the mac osx lion section so people can find it easily, i asked this question on another section of the forum, and will be deleting it as i don't think people can find it which may be a result of the limited replies.

My question is, how do i get the mail app on my macbook to only show the top 50 recent messages from my hotmail account just like i do with my iPhone. Is this possible? Also I have two mailboxes, how to i view messages from both like i do on my iPhone, instead of individually selecting the mail box. Id like all of the mail to appear from both mailboxes when i open he mail app. I think i did something wrong as it used to do this before i clicked on 'display selected messages only' but i can't seem to reverse what i did.

Help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

I don't know about Inbox but you can set up rules to do what you are requesting. Use a smart mailbox with rules that meet your requirements.

 

[r0k]

araah, I'm curious. Why would you want to do this? I prefer to have ALL my email show up on my desktop and it annoys me that ALL my email isn't searchable on my phone. I frequently have to resort to the Gmail app on my iPhone to search deeper into my inbox than the several hundred messages that have come in over the past couple of days.

When you set up an IMAP email client like mail.app or thunderbird, copies of all your email are on your Mac. This is a good thing if your email provider gets hacked, struck by lightning or you somehow get locked out of your own account. Wanting to display only 50 messages seems counter intuitive to me because it implies you might be relying too heavily on somebody's cloud to keep the only copy of your data.

 

[araah]

Thanks for the reply guys! Mattie, i will have an experiment with the smart mailbox and see how it goes. @r0k the reason i dont want all my mail downloaded is because i have a live account and also a gmail account which are both around 5 years old :S and they have old emails in them and i dont want ancient emails downloaded, I also dont want to delete them from my live or gmail accounts on the web as i want to partly keep them. Also another reason is for security. As if my laptop was to be accessed for the brief few minutes im away from it by a friend etc, i dont want them to have access to my emails etc, so if it only downloaded around 50 etc it would be easier for me to manage, and delete/ hide etc the emails that i dont mind people seeing. confusing situation right? haha!

Basically i want the mail app to download all of my recent messages from basically today and store them as it would usually would. I just dont want all of my previous messages download. It doesnt necessarily have to be the most 50 recent like the iphone.