Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6. Decide whether you want the smart mailbox to list messages found in your Trash
or Sent folders, and select or deselect the relevant checkboxes.
7. Click OK.
Mail adds a new smart mailbox to your sidebar with the name and criteria you selected. If you
click that mailbox icon, it should initially display exactly the same messages as your search.
As you receive and delete messages that meet your criteria, the list will change.
Smart Mailbox Suggestions
Here are my favorite suggestions for making smart mailboxes:
•
Show all correspondence with a specific person:
Choose Any from the
pop-up menu at the top. Add two conditions,
[From]
and
[Any Recipient]
,
both of which include the other person's email address. (To show conversations
with more than one person, create a new Contacts group with all the names you
want to include, and instead of
[From]
, choose
[Sender Is a Member of
Group] [some-Address-Book-group]
. Then add
[Any Recipient]
con-
ditions for each person in the group individually.)
Make sure you select Include Messages from Sent to pick up your messages to
this person. For even better results, choose View > Organize by Conversation to
display all your exchanges in a threaded conversation.
•
Display recent unread messages:
If you use rules to move messages into
different mailboxes, you might enjoy seeing all your unread messages—wherever
they may be—in a single place. If you like, limit these to messages received in the
last day (or few days).
•
Locate attachments in Sent mail:
If you often send photos or other large at-
tachments, their copies in your Sent mailbox can take up a lot of space, and you
probably have the originals. Make a smart mailbox with two conditions:
[Con-
tains Attachments] and [Message is in Mailbox] [Sent]
. From
time to time, check this mailbox; to remove attachments from these messages,
select them and choose Message > Remove Attachments.
•
What to do if All and Any aren't smart enough:
If you use the
[Message
is in Mailbox]
condition, the contents of one smart mailbox can depend on
another smart mailbox. This is handy when you have so complex a set of condi-
tions that Any and All are too limited. For example, you might have one smart
mailbox that lists messages from any (“Any”) of several friends, and another that
