[tooms]

I use both Mail and Entourage for viewing email. Entourage has a feature that separates the mail by date-there is an actual separator that blocks all mail from a particular date together. This is very useful when viewing my incoming mail. Is there a way to create a similar view in Mail? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif

[griffman]

You can do this with Smart Mailboxes. Mailbox -> New Smart Mailbox, match "all" conditions, then "Date received" "is today." You could then hit the plus sign and add "Message is in Mailbox" if you have more than one account and don't want to automatically do all of them.
Smart Mailboxes are a great way to do all kinds of sorting without actually modifying your mailboxes.
-rob.

[tooms]

Rob,
Thanks for the info, but this is not quite what I had in mind. I guess I am a visual person who needs to see everything at once, but in easily discernable blocks. With the smart mailbox, I only see the items in that mailbox. Hmmm....

[griffman]

Well, you can do that with Mail's rules, I believe. Create a new rule for "Date received" "is less than one day old." Then set the action to "set color of message" and pick the colors you'd like to see.
If you want multiple colors for multiple aged emails, just create more rules -- less than 2 days and more than one day, less than 3 days and more than 2 days, etc., with different colors for each. Note this is theoretical; I've not tried to do multiple color coding, but this works fine for the new messages.
-rob.

[Dan Frakes]

Although I always like to watch Rob bend OS X to his will /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif unfortunately, there's really no good substitute for this Entourage feature in Mail. (Entourage can group messages by date within each mailbox -- you get a thin divider between each day -- and you can use a different grouping criterion for each mailbox.)

[griffman]

True, Dan, true -- you can't replicate the divider line and differing criteria in Mail. However, with Smart Mailboxes and colors, you can do effectively the same thing, albeit with more work.
There's very little I wish Mail copied from Entourage; this feature, along with the three-pane view, are two of them. (And yes, I know there's a three-pane Mail hack, but it's not quite fully functional.)
-rob.