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Smart Mailbox - how to

T

TemeculaMac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
109
0
My apologies if this is a very simple answer...just tell me if I didn't look hard enough ;)

I just purchased my first MAC (iMac). While getting it all set up last night, I ran into a few snags. I have ~10 pop accounts that I need to check daily. In Outlook Express, I can have incoming mail filtered and placed in their appropriate folders. For some reason, I can not figure out how to do this in mail using smart mailboxes.

For example:

Incoming email TO "user1" needs to go to folder "user1"
Incoming email TO "user2" needs to go to folder "user2"
etc...

I couldn't find in smart mailboxes a way to filter by "TO". I could only see a filter that would do it by a "FROM" address.

Am I missing something?

Many thanks!
Gary
 
I don't have Mail in front of me at the moment, but could this be done with "Rules" (inside of Preferences) instead of Smart Mailboxes? Create a regular folder "user1" and then create a rule to move the sent items to that folder. Will that work?
 
Sorry for jumping the gun. Looks like mail doesn't really have that capability, but the following plugin will take care of it:

http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html

Not sure why this functionality was left out...seems like a big oversight. Oh well, at least I have a new plugin to work with.

You are now free to ignore this post :D
 
tobefirst said:
I don't have Mail in front of me at the moment, but could this be done with "Rules" (inside of Preferences) instead of Smart Mailboxes? Create a regular folder "user1" and then create a rule to move the sent items to that folder. Will that work?
Click to expand...

Good question! I didn't see a "Rules" option, but I'll certainly try that when I get home.

Thanks!
Gary
 
tobefirst is correct. There's an item in Rules called Account. Use that to send messages to the appropriate mailbox.
 
I think there's also some confusion about what a smart mailbox is. It's not a classic mailbox. You don't store messages in it. It only virtually houses those messages. It's equivalent to a saved search. The expectation is that the messages are actually in another folder somewhere else (Inbox, etc). Smart Mailbox does not do anything to the original message.

You *CAN* make a smart mailbox using data from the "to" field. The correct entry in the smart mailbox dialog is the one marked "any recipient" (which is the same as "to."). You can also use the search bar in Mail, use the "to" delimiter there, and then save the search (which also creates a smart mailbox).

But, that smart mailbox only virtually stores the messages.

Rules, on the other hand, do affect the actual message in terms of moving it, deleting it, etc.

Rules do respect the "to" field, I believe. There is a little glitch, which is that if you use another device to access your mail, and you use IMAP, messages that are not unread by the time they hit your inbox may get partially processed. For me, if I get a read (but new to Mail) message in the Inbox, the color changes but it does not successfully moved to the destination mailbox (I use this feature all the time, primarily to weed low priority mail like iTunes receipts and listserves into storage boxes).
 
Thanks for the great explanation. My thinking was backwards, as I *thought* smart mailboxes were rules. It appears that smart mailboxes are not what I want, rather rules should do the trick.
 
No probs... go beta test it for a couple of days and see if its working how you want it to, and please let us know! :)

I <3 <3 <3 Mail rules... they make such a big difference.

My most egregious use though was, when I was really busy in my last engineering job, I set up an Outlook rule that marked all mail from our HR people as read and threw it in a saved mail folder, because I was 99.9% sure it would not be valuable to read it. :eek: ;) :D
 
Missing fields in Smart Mailboxes

I want a smart mailbox to sort by messages that are only "to" me (I'm the only recipient), but I don't even seen a "to" field. The closest thing is "Any Recipient". Rules have the "To" field - why don't smart mailboxes? Rather annoying that there are different lists of criteria and you can't seem to edit them.

Any insights?
 
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