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illjazz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 18, 2008
227
2
I never used Mail. Never seriously considered it an option because I'm so used to Gmail's web UI. In Lion, I'm giving Mail a serious try and so far, I like it a lot. It's beautifully designed, fast and useful.

But one command that is absolutely essential to the email workflow, as any heavy Gmail user will know, namely "archive", seems to be without keyboard shortcut in Lion's Mail. Can that be? Am I missing something?

"E" is one of my most used keyboard shortcuts in Gmail. It's hard to believe Apple forgot a keyboard shortcut for "archive". Anyone know more?

EDIT:
Remembered another thing that's bothering me in Mail. When replying, the quoted text (usually the entire message I'm replying to), the cursor is placed just one line above the quoted message. I like one empty line between my new message and the old, quoted one. I keep having to hit enter and go back up before replying. Any way to set this up so the quoted message is on the third line already when replying? Thanks!
 
I'm in exactly the same situation as you, so I'll bump this. Would really like an easy shortcut to archive messages. Maybe a third party script or app can solve this?
 
It seems really weird they didn't give "archive" its own shortcut, but hey.
 
Add your own Archive keyboard shortcut

You can add your own keyboard shortcut:

Go to System Preferences->Keyboard and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Select Application Shortcuts on the left list and Click + under the right list.

In the popup, set Application to 'Mail', Menu Title to 'Archive' and assign your own Keyboard Shortcut (I used Command-Shift-A).

Works great. I'll be using this a lot.
 
What's the advantage of archiving over simply deleting messages and leaving them in the trash? I've done that for years; they're still searchable and don't necessarily get purged automatically.
 
You can add your own keyboard shortcut:

Go to System Preferences->Keyboard and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Select Application Shortcuts on the left list and Click + under the right list.

In the popup, set Application to 'Mail', Menu Title to 'Archive' and assign your own Keyboard Shortcut (I used Command-Shift-A).

Works great. I'll be using this a lot.
Perfect. Thank you!

What's the advantage of archiving over simply deleting messages and leaving them in the trash? I've done that for years; they're still searchable and don't necessarily get purged automatically.
They stay around versus vanishing forever. That means they're searchable in the future. I don't need this for all types of messages, of course... but for a good number of messages, it's very helpful. That's why Google did it with Gmail, anyway.

I don't know if they get purged automatically, but I do believe I used a setting in Mail's preferences that set it to be purged automatically, which is precisely the behavior I'd expect for deleted messages... but not for archived ones.
 
Ok, well my settings are so that the trash never automatically purges. So I guess in essence, my trash is my archive. I search it all the time.

The only time it would be different would be if it's set to auto-purge. And then I suppose you'd be manually deciding which you want around and which you don't.
 
hey guys

what I did to my mail.app worked great.

first, on mail.app I went to preferences -> accounts -> mygmailaccount and I disabled the "move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox" and tadá :) it is awesome.
now my "archive" shortcut is just the simple delete key :D

It works perfectly and I haven't seen any problems by doing this, it works just as the archive in gmail's webui.

Good luck, and I hope it helps you guys, cheers
 
Last edited:
What's the advantage of archiving over simply deleting messages and leaving them in the trash? I've done that for years; they're still searchable and don't necessarily get purged automatically.
I used to do it this way myself. Until I installed a snow leopard update once that toggled my "delete" settings in the mail app. It started trashing everything.
 
This is why there are separate "archive" and "delete" actions. They do different things, obviously...
 
hey guys

what I did to my mail.app worked great.

first, on mail.app I went to preferences -> accounts -> mygmailaccount and I disabled the "move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox" and tadá :) it is awesome.
now my "archive" shortcut is just the simple delete key :D

It works perfectly and I haven't seen any problems by doing this, it works just as the archive in gmail's webui.

Good luck, and I hope it helps you guys, cheers
I don't understand. This actually "archives" the items or does it permanently delete them?
 
I don't understand. This actually "archives" the items or does it permanently delete them?

Hi :)

Just to inform, I'm using Mail.app Version 5.0 (1244.2/1244.3).
By doing this, when you press delete, it will only remove the message from the inbox "folder". This way, if you want to find this message again, just go to the "all mail" label, and you'll see it there.

You can test if it's working by sending yourself a message and testing. For me it worked perfectly :)

This is the best way I found to make mail.app really archive things.

cheers guys
 
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