"Sender is in my address book" feature of Mail.app

[Doctor Q]

I use over a dozen rules in Mail.app to sort my mail into mailboxes, display some in color, alert me to particular types of messages, and so on.

Some of the rule conditions you can use are

Sender is in my Address Book
Sender is not in my Address Book
Sender is in my Previous Recipients
Sender is not in my Previous Recipients​

I use "Sender is not in my Address Book" to move mail from people I don't know into a "Not Recognized" folder, so that I can review it separately and be more wary of junk there. Essentially, my Address Book serves as a whitelist and anybody in that list gets direct entry into my main inbox, while everyone else goes into "Not Recognized".

But I keep wishing for another rule condition:

Sender's domain is not in my Address Book​

That's because my Address Book includes vendors I buy from, e.g., myvendor.com, but they sent me mail from [email]orders@myvendor.com[/email], [email]confirmation@myvendor.com[/email], [email]sales@myvendor.com[/email], [email]returns@myvendor.com[/email], [email]specials@myvendor.com[/email], [email]news@myvendor.com[/email], and so on. I don't know all of their email addresses in advance, but I'd like them all to be considered a match for that Address Book entry.

Examples: The big A's (Apple, Amazon, Adobe) use many different email addresses, all in their domains.

In other words, I want to be able to put "myvendor.com" in my Address Book and have all email from that domain stay in my inbox.

I could add rules like

From ... Ends with ... apple.com​

to get the same effect, but I'd have to enter one rule for each company in my address book, and that's not very practical.

I can suggest the new rule condition to Apple, but I wondered if this makes sense to any of you, and whether there is another way to do this that I haven't thought of.

 

[mkrishnan]

I understand what you mean, and it seems like basically a good idea...

One problem I could see is that, given that you (probably) have at least one gmail.com, one yahoo.com, one hotmail.com, etc, mail addresses in your Address Book, then such a rule would automatically label every single person from those domains as a "recognized sender" for you. Which is probably not what you had in mind....

 

[swiftaw]

That seems like something pretty useful.

My main gripe with mail.app is the fact that if the sender is in your address book that it doesn't always use the name that is listed int he address book but sometimes just quotes the email address or some other version of the name. Why can't mail.app always display the name as it is listed in the address book?

 

[Doctor Q]

I understand what you mean, and it seems like basically a good idea...

One problem I could see is that, given that you (probably) have at least one gmail.com, one yahoo.com, one hotmail.com, etc, mail addresses in your Address Book, then such a rule would automatically label every single person from those domains as a "recognized sender" for you. Which is probably not what you had in mind....

Hmmm.... Yes, that's true.

Perhaps, instead, we should be allowed to use an email address with a wildcard, like *@apple.com, in Address Book. Even though you can't sent to or receive from that specific address, the wildcard would match when the "Sender is in my Address Book" conditional was used. That way, no new rule choices are needed, only a syntactic convention in Address Book and the code in Mail.app to do the matching in a more general way.

 

[mkrishnan]

Perhaps, instead, we should be allowed to use an email address with a wildcard, like *@apple.com, in Address Book. Even though you can't sent to or receive from that specific address, the wildcard would match when the "Sender is in my Address Book" conditional was used. That way, no new rule choices are needed, only a syntactic convention in Address Book and the code in Mail.app to do the matching in a more general way.

That sounds nice. I kind of wish Spotlight supported wildcards sometimes also. And I do definitely wish at times that the rules in Mail were more sophisticated.

 

[EricNau]

Hmmm.... Yes, that's true.

Perhaps, instead, we should be allowed to use an email address with a wildcard, like *@apple.com, in Address Book. Even though you can't sent to or receive from that specific address, the wildcard would match when the "Sender is in my Address Book" conditional was used. That way, no new rule choices are needed, only a syntactic convention in Address Book and the code in Mail.app to do the matching in a more general way.

If such a rule existed, wouldn't it use the home page url field rather than the email address? That way, email addresses ending with a domain such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com wouldn't be taken into consideration.

For example, if you had Circuit City in your address book with a home page url of circuitcity.com, all of the email originating from that domain would get through your filter.

 

[mkrishnan]

If such a rule existed, wouldn't it use the home page url field rather than the email address? That way, email addresses ending with a domain such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com wouldn't be taken into consideration.

That's an interesting idea. I think the problem is that, in the corporate world, a lot of the small business vendors (at least, in my past experience), might not have web pages. And also frequently the web page and the domain name for the e-mail server are actually different....