I'm basically one of Pavlov's dogs when it comes to email. So let's address the salt and bells of today's technology.

October 31, 2011 12:19 PM

What's the best way to filter mail on the mail app for mac?

Here's the details - I have four main accounts I use my mail program with - a gmail, a me.com mail, a work email and a yahoo mail. Everything but the yahoo is IMAP I believe. As such there are four sub-inboxes under the main inbox in the mailbox listing.

What I'd like is for all mail that isn't important personal email or work email to go to a subfolder so I can look at it all at the end of the day. Because when I hear the ding I HAVE to look at it. Whatever it is. And I don't WANT to be interrupted. But I DO want to see today's groupons, and gilt city and urban daddy. I just don't want to see it till 5PM when I'm on the downslope of productivity.

Is there some way to do this? Some mail add-on? Something?

posted by rileyray3000 to Technology (4 answers total)

Smart mailboxes will do a lot of this. You'll want to set up a smart mailbox to only include work and "important personal" e-mail (however you define that). You can keep that one selected, and set your dock icon badge to display number of unread messages only in that smart mailbox.

Not sure about the ding. One possibility is to turn it off and go by the dock icon. I think it dings whenever something shows up in the unified Inbox. Not sure if there's a way to change that.
posted by supercres at 12:25 PM on October 31, 2011

As to the ding, you can turn off the new messages sound in the "General" portion of the Mail preferences. If you want it to ding when a message is delivered to a particular mailbox, you can add a rule to the "Rules" section of the preferences that creates a sound when mail comes to or from a particular email address.
posted by procrastination at 12:47 PM on October 31, 2011

MailTags
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:53 PM on October 31, 2011

You can also do this with inbox rules.
posted by Runes at 8:04 PM on October 31, 2011