Have Apple Mail Pre-Prioritize Your Messages

Handling email has always been a kind of fight for me: unfortunately, I am highly susceptible to procrastination, so as soon as I spot a fresh mailing list digest or a new issue of my favorite Macintosh e-zine in my inbox amongst all those important emails, it's the latter which immediately disappear from my "conscious field of vision."

But I think I have found a remedy: simply move those less important emails out of the way and deal with them later, so I can check the more important stuff without being distracted. This approach turned out to work quite well and, thanks to Mail's rules and Smart Mailboxes, it can be fully automated, too.

Here's the basic idea: reading messages like that Mac e-zine is obviously less important than dealing with emails from clients or colleagues, so I might as well move the former to some kind of "holding bay" in order to fully concentrate on the latter. Come to think of it, this is not only about moving less important messages out of the way, but also about moving those messages out of the inbox that I receive more or less regularly. That's because I have developed certain habits about how I deal with these regular messages, so that, when compared with more "unusual" emails, I'm much more efficient at working through them.

Have a look at the screenshot on the right, which shows my current set of mailboxes in Apple Mail. The Smart Mailboxes combine all messages for a certain category, and they are sorted by descending importance. To manage my daily emails without too much risk of being side-tracked, I start with the inbox and then work my way down the list of Smart Mailboxes.

In addition to pre-prioritizing my emails that way, different categories may also require different mindsets to effectively deal with the emails inside them. Consequently, if you're familiar with the "Getting Things Done" methodology, you might think of those Smart Mailboxes as a kind of "mental contexts."

The setup is based on two simple steps:

1. Move any incoming email that should show up in one (or more) of those category folders, to the Archive folder.
2. Make Apple Mail bring those emails back to my attention via Smart Mailboxes.

Automatically archiving incoming messages

To move specific emails out of the inbox and into the Archive folder, you need a rule in Mail that, as its sole action, moves selected messages into your Archive folder. Note, by the way, that there is just a single Archive folder in the screenshot above. Ever since Apple added Smart Mailboxes and Spotlight-based search to Mail, there is just no reason to waste any time on manually archiving your email into countless folders.

Listing emails in Smart Mailboxes

To make all those messages, that are now automatically archived, accessible again, set up Smart Mailboxes for any category that you consider useful depending on the kinds of emails you usually receive.

Smart Mailboxes can also list messages that are in the Trash. So, if you want to include messages in this setup that you'd like to read, but don't consider worth archiving -- say, a status warning by your webhosting provider, etc --, just add another mail rule that moves those messages directly to the Trash instead of the Archive folder, and check the respective Smart Mailbox's "Include Messages from Trash" option.

In that case, though, be sure to set the Trash to be emptied manually lest those messages be deleted before you had a chance to read them. You can find the corresponding option in the "Mailbox Behaviors" pane of Apple Mail's "Accounts" preferences.

Why smart mailboxes?

Obviously, you could implement a similar system using standard folders, however there is a key advantage to using Smart Mailboxes: you do not need to move around any messages manually.

Imagine that you would prefer to only see unread issues of a specific newsletter. To create the appropriate Smart Mailbox, you'd define one condition based, e.g., on the newsletter's sender address and a second condition "Message is unread", and you're done. Using a standard mailbox in this case would require you to manually move read messages on to the Archive, adding more email management overhead instead of helping reduce it.

Also, depending on the specific mailboxes you've decided to use, it may be handy for an email to show up in more than one mailbox. With standard mailboxes, this would require you to create copies of that email, while a message will "automatically" appear in any and all Smart Mailboxes whose selection criteria it matches.

More of the same

More of the same kind of email hacks, that is. Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" articles on 43folders.com provide plenty advice on how to improve the efficiency with which you manage your daily dose of emails.

If all of this is new to you, a great starting point is Joe Kissell's three-part series called "Empty Your Inbox" (1, 2, 3), which covers all the basics on how to regain control of your email inbox.