Take Control of Your Inbox - Take Control of Apple Mail (1.0) - page 69

than a hundred intricately nested mailboxes—and at a certain point, that made it harder,
rather than easier, to sort and find email. Although I haven't gone so far as to use a single
Archive mailbox for all saved messages, as some people do, I've deliberately reduced the
number of mailboxes I use, and I hope before long to end up in the single digits. Having few-
er mailboxes makes it quicker to file messages and involves a lot less scrolling, especially on
iOS devices.
I explain why and how I optimized my mailboxes in a Macworld article called Simplify your
email . The short version is: use as few mailboxes as possible, and make the categories they
represent as broad, distinct, and unambiguous as possible.
Once you've done that, and assuming you're using an IMAP or Exchange email account (so
your server-based folders are synced between all your devices), I suggest taking two addition-
al steps to make life easier for yourself in Mail for iOS, which always displays mailboxes in
alphabetical order and which has no controls for collapsing or expanding hierarchical mail-
boxes:
1. If any of your most frequently used mailboxes aren't already at the top level
of your mailbox hierarchy, move them there—you're looking for a flat structure
without sub-mailboxes, or at least with as few as possible.
2. Rename your most frequently used mailboxes so they appear alphabetically be-
fore the rest of your mailboxes. One easy way to do this is to put a punctuation
character at the beginning of each name. For example, change Work to _Work .
Characters such as the underscore (_), hyphen (-), and period (.) work well.
(Some mail servers won't accept a space at the beginning of a mailbox name.)
3. You can further adjust the names to put them in a specific order.
For example, if you started with this:
_Apple
_Family
_Recreation
_Work
You might rename them like this to force a particular sort order:
_1 Recreation