[Macworld]

Post your comments for Cataloging Mail by date here

[toad]

Nice tip! I've added "Prior Month" with Date Received is between 1 and 1 month ago

[billthecat]

A little caution with this though. Today is literally today, and not the last 24 hours. So, for example, any mail received after you go to sleep but before midnight will not be included in the next day's "today" filter, so if you focus too much on that smart folder, you could overlook some mail. For that reason, I use a smart folder for the last two days. Similarly, last month is not the last 30 day, and so on.

[MikeNTosh]

I do think this is a good tip.
I think that Mr. Breen misunderstood what the Reader is talking about. It's not a saved search. In Entourage when viewing any folder of messages, by default the option to view messages by group is selected as well as by date. Which gives headers as the Reader describes. You can also select different criteria for those groups such as by conversation, sender, recipient, etc. and even make your own custom groups. This is a very nice feature especially when you have set up different folders and rules to file messages to those folders. Each folder can have it's own group viewing settings.
This feature is something that Apple should seriously take a look at as it is adding features especially for enterprise.
I've been running both Entourage and Mail simultaneously for almost 6 months now to see if I can make the switch to Apple mail. Unfortunately, although it has been improving, I can't justify switching yet. Apple still doesn't have anything that even comes close to the "Projects" feature of Entourage.

[alansky]

Of course, all that's really necessary to search for a message received withiin the last couple of days is to sort the Inbox by Date Received. Entourage is a ticking time bomb as far as I'm concerned. Sooner or later, the Entourage database will become unreadable, resulting in a certain amount of lost mail unless preventive steps are taken in advance.

[Chris Breen]

MikeNTosh said:

> I think that Mr. Breen misunderstood what the Reader is talking about. It's not a saved search.

Actually the reader replied by email "Thank you so much for the help. This is exactly what I wanted."

So, I still get to count this one in the Plus column. ;)

Still, I like the feature you're describing and it would be nice to see it in Mail.

[leehljp]

How does one email Chris Breen. Sure is nice to ask questions like this and get answers that normal help forums don't know the answer.
I run into a problem often and see a few others with the same problem with "mail". Some of us get some "confidential" mail, and yet we also have to refer to emails during presentations/trainings on occasion. It would be great to have a single mailbox/folder within "Mail" that could locked or secured from prying eyes instead of hovering over the MB every second.

[Chris Breen]

leehljp said:

How does one email Chris Breen. Sure is nice to ask questions like this and get answers that normal help forums don't know the answer.

You're welcome to send messages to mac911-at-macworld.com with the understanding that I can't offer personal tech support and anything you submit is considered column/blog fodder.

Quote

I run into a problem often and see a few others with the same problem with "mail". Some of us get some "confidential" mail, and yet we also have to refer to emails during presentations/trainings on occasion. It would be great to have a single mailbox/folder within "Mail" that could locked or secured from prying eyes instead of hovering over the MB every second.

For this kind of thing I'd set up a dummy Gmail account and run it under a different account -- one that you reserve for presentations and training.

[fitz]

I had to add one additional condition to get this to work for me. I added: Message is in MailBox InBox. That way it did not list all the spam in my junk folder.

[simplicity]

This is a little off topic but the reason I (reluctantly) keep coming back to Entourage is the color-coding feature that let's me set colors by category. I have different colors for clients, services, newsgroups etc, and can see at glance what's important.
Until Mail has a feature like that, I'll be hangin' in with Entourage.

[waterloom]

I am also a triple user of Mail, Entourage, and Gmail. Frankly, I use Mail only out of loyalty to Apple--but it is my least favorite of the three. I would love it if I could get Mail to do some of what I rely of the other two for. First, how do I set up a smart mailbox to show all unread messages? I love the "unread" feature on GMail, which makes it very easy to delete spam. Is there a status code somewhere that I could invoke?
Second, I would like to create a smart mailbox to deal with duplicate messages. I am on so many mailing lists, and some are duplicated across my four email accounts. How to identify duplicates (and delete all but one)?
Just a start, but I would love some help with this.

[jeremybechtold]

i was thinking the same thing (by him not understanding the the users original concern), and while the comment below suggests that it did work for the person questioning the issue, the interface that entourage has for this is way better than any saved search can be. the deal-breaking for mail is that it doesn't list them in the main list view of messages, and then group by you chosen criteria. entourage essentially groups by one set of criteria, and then orders by the default within that list. this is useful much more so in sub-folders, perhaps for projects where you need to find a comment made by a certain... there's no need to "create" a saved/custom search, it's just there by clicking the column header. that's doable in mail, but the inset headers are great for quick finds.

i too tried switching to mail, just for my home computer a little while back, we lasted about a week. thankfully, during the experiment, we left a copy of each message on the server and had entourage updated at the same time.

[toad]

waterloom said:

>First, how do I set up a smart mailbox to show all unread messages? I love the "unread" feature on GMail, which makes it very easy to delete spam. Is there a status code somewhere that I could invoke?

That's pretty much just a variant on what this article was all about. Did you try any of the examples?

In Mail, under Mailbox menu, choose "New Smart Mailbox..."

In the resulting window set the name to "Unread Messages" (or whatever), and set the first criteria to "Message is Unread"... then click OK (or make further modifications to suit your needs) and you'll be staring at the results. Sort by date or how you wish. Easy as pie!

[jmjdave]

I have considered switching for a while, and even more so now that Entourage crashes between 5 and 10 times a day (luckily, it recovers unsent emails that I'm working on). It started crashing around the time that I installed the Safari 4 beta, but even after uninstalling Safari 4 beta and moving to the real thing (Safari 4) the crashing continues. The thing that I don't want to do is setup all my rules again (I have a bunch) and my email distribution lists (I have a dozen or so but some are around 100 entires). Plus, I like the category feature on the contacts. Any thoughts on bringing them over (other than manually)? Plus, Entourage seems better overall for power users…