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Couldn't you have a rule, as you suggested, that sorts your email as it arrives. But, in addition, create a Smart Mailbox, which allows you to view Today's mail? I actually have 2 smart mailboxes for "today's mail" - one that is "Today's Mail" which shows all email received today in a box, and a "Today & Unread" smart mailbox, which shows all email received today that I haven't read yet. Why two Today boxes? My life is complicated!

LynneLaMaster, on 11 June 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

Do you ignore yesterday's mail? I have rules set up as in the article and just have an unread mail smart mailbox. Works for me.

I don't know about anyone else but even as a power user, I still am confounded by the rules. You can set "to" but the "from" is "any recipient contains" and sometimes I get it to work, other times I don't, especially when I have email accounts from a few different places (my business, me.com, gmail) and smart mailboxed recipients send to all three.

I just wish it was easier. To be blunt: I really think Apple Mail is pretty clunky and so spartan any more that having way too many emails in my inbox is also a product of it not being easy to sort (just discovered that "HOME" key on extended keyboard will let you get to the top when the picky scrollbar keeps disappearing) or to file on rules.

Maybe Mountain Lion 8...

The best, most useful enhancement would be: Mail arrives, after I've read it I can invoke a rule that files it at the end of a pages document preserving all headers that has previously been linked to that e-mail address. It would save sooooo much time filing things away and keeping an in-box under control.

Here is how I read the mail and then filter it later using rules:
<http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110502223817188>

JudyRay, on 12 June 2012 - 12:44 AM, said:

This link takes me to the most current hints rather than to the one you intended.

-ccs

Although I own and like Mail Act-On, I find MailHub to be a better overall solution for filing messages and a few other actions. (http://www.dervishsoftware.com) Also - it has been a good while since MAO had more than a maintenance update.

MailHub especially shines in its ability to intelligently guess where a message should be filed, and it allows you carry out the [move/copy]-action based on this guess with a single keystroke. It also has a pop-up list similar in functionality to MAO's Heads Up Display (HUD).

There are enough differences between Mail Act-On and MailHub that I use them both as well as the freeware plugins MailFollowUp and QuoteFix. This combination of add-ons makes Mail.app a very serviceable email client, and I'd hate to have to live without any one of them.

The best way I've found to deal with Jordan's problem is to create a well thought out set of mailboxes, mail-rules, and smart-mailboxes. (Currently I have 117 mailboxes and 25 smart-mailboxes.)

All of my mail except for critical and/or favorite senders as well as uncategorized senders is filtered away from the InBox and into other relevant mailboxes. I then use my smart-mailboxes to show unread mail in these in order of importance. This keeps my InBox free of all but the most important items and makes it really easy to triage the unknowns.

I read new mail starting from my first smart-mailbox which collates unread mail from the root InBox containing the InBoxes of each of my 6 email accounts. After reading I leave only vital items that need immediate attention in the InBox and then proceed down the smart-mailbox-chain which is arranged order of priority.

The first part of my On-My-Mac mailbox tree is a modified version of GTD (Getting Things Done).

Mail.app is indeed a feature-poor email client (I still miss Eudora's power-user features), but it can be made to jump through a lot of hoops Apple never envisioned.

-ccs

Here is my hint from May 13, 2007:

Hold mail in the Inbox, then filter it when ready

May 13, '11 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: emaven
Mail rules are automatically applied to incoming messages. I want to move messages to local mailboxes using rules, but not right as they come in.

Here is how I 'hold' the e-mail in the inbox until after I have read them, and then apply rules. (Rules are set up in Mail » Preferences » Rules).

First I have rules to filter spam into folders that I can look at later and catch the false positives. Then I have rules for coloring certain mail to call attention to them.

Then I have the rule for holding the mail:
Description: Date < 5 for manual filtering.
If any of the following conditions are met: Date Received is less than 5 days old
Perform the following actions: Stop evaluating rules
Then I have many rules for filtering mail into local mailboxes previously set up.
What this does is keep all the mail in the inbox except for those filtered out as spam. Since new mail is always less than five days old, nothing else happens because the rules are stopped.

Then when I have read all the mail and am ready, I just use Command+Option+L, which is the command for applying rules. This will take all the mail older than 5 days, and perform the rules on them. This sorts them into their respective local mailboxes, or whatever I have set as a rule. It leaves mail up to five days old in the inbox. If you want to leave mail for a longer or shorter time, you can just change the '5' to whatever value (in days) you want.

[crarko adds: I think I'll be making use of this. I also get a lot of mail that I don't want to move right away since I might miss something, but eventually want to sort into folders so I don't have 5000+ messages sitting in the Inbox, like I do at the moment.]

I meant May 13, 2011

How can I send mail as a group on my iPad the way ican do on my iMac ????

This is why I have stuck with Eudora all these years and will be the last person in the Mac user world to adopt Lion/MountainLion.

Stannffp, on 18 June 2012 - 07:04 AM, said:

I'll be right in there with you! I've used Eudora for 20 years! Still love it, and find it the most useful and flexible mail program out there.

I followed the steps Christopher outlined to create rules by adding Return-Path to the menu. But what I found was that each time I quit and relaunched Mail, not only was the Return-Path option gone, but all of the rules I had created using it are gone as well. I noted that many of my spam emails are coming from the same ISP, so the method holds great promise. But so far it does not work for me except as a one-time deal.