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Clever! Thank you, "radek," for the hint! Plus, there is also a smart mailbox. But this begs the question: "Why does the Mail.app smart box ruleset not include the possibility to make the rule

New AND [("From>in My Previous Recipients) OR (From> Is in My Address Book)]

That would avoid flagging the messages, which then need to be un-flagged by hand later. One day...?

This post has been edited by thubsch: 12 June 2012 - 03:33 AM

 thubsch, on 12 June 2012 - 03:10 AM, said:

Or spend $15 to get DockStar. It will let you put up to five mailboxes on Mail's icon in the Dock, showing how many unread messages are in each of those mailboxes. It will also put icons in the menu bar, showing the same information, and allow you to click on any of those icons to open its associated mailbox folder. (It also has a nifty screen saver with the same information.)

I do something a little different. I get most of my personal mail delivered duplicated to 2 different inboxes. I filter and store mail coming from GMail to folders on my Mac. Only email that is unfiltered in the GMail inbox is interesting from an immediacy point of view. The filtered mail is for backup, I don't care what happens to it on GMail long term. When I've finished reading my GMail inbox, I archive those remaining messages on my Mac for future reference as well.

I also get all of my mail to my iCloud inbox. My iCloud inbox is unfiltered. This makes it easier to read on my various iOS devices. When I've read it, I can delete it knowing that I have a copy on my Mac via my GMail account. I don't get GMail on my iPad or iPhone, just iCloud. Then I also have my work Exchange inbox which also qualifies as interesting.

Having duplicate email from both iCloud and GMail leads to doubling of my apparent unread email on my Mac. To solve this issue, I just create a smart mailbox that counts mail in the GMail inbox and Exchange inbox but ignores my iCloud inbox. This works well, I can ignore my iCloud inbox until I have time to read things like mailing lists and other non-critical email but my unread count on the Mail badge still shows how many emails that may need immediate responses.

This post has been edited by jdb8167: 12 June 2012 - 11:08 AM