|
 Many people skip Apple's built-in mail client in favour of
Entourage. But in many respects, Mail is far more powerful than Entourage and
nowhere is this more obvious than with Smart Mailboxes. What are these and how can you set them up?
To understand Smart Mailboxes you have to think of Mail as being a
Database. In a database you enter records and then you can perform queries on
that data to get the data that you want. This is exactly the principle behind
Smart Mailboxes (henceforth referred to as SMBs cos I'm too lazy to keep typing
it out). In the case of Mail the data is e-mails, but the results are still
queries on the data.
In Mail, on the left (where your Inbox et al are listed) you'll see I
have a number of purple coloured folders. Like iTunes' Smart Playlists these
are SMBs. To set these up follow these very simple steps:
From the menu go to "Mailbox" - > "New Smart Mailbox"
You will see a box like this:
I'm going to set one up for TradeMe so here's my set-up:
To explain what you are seeing in the above image, we have the name
we are going to call the SMB, in this case simply "TradeMe".
The first of the drop down options is set to "all" by default. This means that every query MUST match the conditions
outlined before the results will be displayed. As there is only one query then
"all" will suffice. I'll show you a slightly
more complex one later.
The second drop down is set to "From" by default. It can be set to check or search anything in an email, from the
sender , the body of the e-mail, the subject field or even the recipients list.
The third drop down is set to "Contains" by default but the other options are:
- Does not contain
- Begins with
- Ends with
- Is equal to
Then there is a text field which I have filled in as "TradeMe".
Click "OK" and you're done.
So the SMB will now show you only e-mails from TradeMe.
But this is only a simple query. Let's take a look at a more complex
one:
This one is a little more complex but is also fairly
straightforward. Basically this SMB will search all e-mails from Apple but
filter out the ones from iTunes so I'm only left with e-mails from Apple,
without seeing all my iTunes receipts.
Here's where things can become complex. Remember the "all" drop down? Well it's second option is "any" which means that any of the queries can be executed it doesn't have
to be both. By doing this in this example it will perform none of the queries
so the "any" option is kind of moot. That
doesn't mean to say "any" doesn't have its
place.
But I can hear many of you saying, yes but isn't this the same for
any e-mail app? No it is actually quite different. In most cases you can set-up
folders and then set-up rules to move those e-mails to those folders based on
the queries, but this is very limited. If you set-up a rule that moves an email
to a folder then that's it. You can't share.
For example take this rule:
Here I've used the "any" option because I want any e-mails from Lee and any e-mails from
Phil to show up (note that in this instance it would be any "From" with the
words "Phil" or "Lee" in it, so you may want to be more specific). Now if this
was a rule set-up to move e-mails to specific folders then any rules I have for
say Lee or Phil where I only want to read mail from them individually will not
work because they've been moved.
Using SMBs mean that all the mail stays in
your inbox but you can quickly access them without having to wade through huge
amounts of e-mails just to get to the ones you want. In this respect, you can
see that it is very much like iTunes's smart playlists.
So those are Smart Mailboxes. I fully recommend them and watch out
for Leopard because there's going to be some awesome changes which means SMBs
could be incredibly handier than they already are.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
