Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Now, when viewing your account's mailboxes, you can quickly access the most commonly
used ones in Mail in both OS X and iOS.
Use Rules
Rules, sometimes referred to as filters, process messages as they come in. Each rule looks
for certain
conditions
(criteria such as a sender, subject, or words in the message body), and
then takes one or more
actions
whenever a match is found (moving the message into a cer-
tain mailbox, sending an automatic reply, deleting the message, or whatever).
If you're trying to keep your Inbox under control, rules are one of the most powerful tools
available. Because I presort my email with rules, tons of messages that don't require imme-
diate attention never reach my Inbox at all; instead, they're safely shunted to other mail-
boxes where I can review them at my convenience. Creating a good set of rules requires a bit
of thought and effort, but once you've done that, those rules operate invisibly in the back-
ground.
Rules can operate either in Mavericks Mail or directly on your incoming mail server. The
huge advantage to server-based rules is that they can presort messages before you see
them—which also cuts down on the amount of mail you need to process on your iOS
devices—and they do so even if Mail isn't running on your Mac. On the other hand, rules run-
ning in Mavericks Mail can do several tricks that server-based rules can't, such as running
user-defined AppleScripts on matching messages, and moving messages to mailboxes in oth-
er accounts.
Depending on your needs (and the capabilities of your email provider), you may want to use
a combination of server-based and local rules.
Use Server-based Rules
Many email providers with webmail interfaces—including iCloud and Gmail—offer ways to
create server-based rules or filters. These are often more limited than the rules available in
Mail, but I still recommend starting with server-based rules if possible and then using Mail
only for actions you can't accomplish on the server.
You'll need to check with your email provider to see whether it offers rules or filters, and if
so, what the procedure is to configure them. To offer just two examples:
