![]() I make heavy use of the rules I have hundreds, but they are a source of profound frustration, especially with each upgrade but at many other times. ![]() You can't say "if this and any of these three" you have to set up three "and" rules. There also used to be Mail scripts, but they long ago became too unstable (were ruined/deprecated by OS releases).įor Mail.app rule and Smart Mailbox conditions, there are no compound conditions. The provided rules do not access any state information.Īlso, Command-Option-L lets you run the rules at any time on selected messages, so you don't have to use rules only on incoming mail. Things like: is there a flag set on the mail, and if so, which one? Or is the message in (or not in) this mailbox? That would allow cascading rules. They used to, but it seems like there is no one maintaining these features something new is introduced elsewhere and breaks another feature they don't care about with each OS release.Ī bunch of those conditions would be really useful if they were available for rules. If only smart mailboxes still worked reliably. There's a different set of conditions available for "smart mailboxes". Only, click on Add a rule and you'll see the limitations immediately. So far it all seems much the same as you now get a list of any rules you've already created. From the brief menu that pops up, choose Rules. Look for the gear icon at the bottom left of your screen and click on that. You've seen how comprehensive Apple Mail rules are on your Mac. If you can't do this or the idea of leaving a Mac on permanently troubles you for green or electricity bill reasons, you can use iCloud's Mail rules. If you can do both, then whenever you do look at your email, the rules will have worked and all that's left are messages that need your attention. The two best solutions to this are to have a Mac running 24/7 somewhere and to lay off checking your email every time it bleeps at you. So you can set up all of this and have it defeated just because you happened to see the messages on your iPhone. Worse, if you do read them, they get marked as read and Mail rules only work on unread messages as they arrive in your inbox. This means that you're being unnecessarily distracted by emails you don't actually need to read at all. It's just that you'll have seen those emails arrive on your phone. That's actually not a dreadful thing: it still works the rules, it still deals with the emails. So if you solely use a MacBook Pro then the rules only apply when you sit down somewhere and open the lid. ![]() These rules work brilliantly but they only work at all if your Mac is on. Once you know you can do this, you set up rules for everything - and then you stop because of the limitations. We've set up a lot so our Rules screen looks like this: ![]() You get a list of all the rules you've set up. Whatever you want to do, you first open Mail, then choose Preferences and click on Rules. Mail can look to see if you were CCd or BCCd on her message and if you were, delete it automatically. You've got that friend you like but who keeps sending everyone funny GIFs. Or you could have Mail simply trash every message from your boss - when those messages are also CCd to your assistant. At the same time, if that email comes in from your boss, you could tell Mail to instead send an out-of-office that includes the phone number of your vacation hotel. So for instance, you can tell Mail to send a vaguely-worded automated out-of-office if you receive an email from someone you don't know. However, you can work around this a little and if you do, you can also use the excellent Mail rules on your Mac to help you wherever you are. To our mind, though, the flaw is that the rules you can set up in iCloud are so limited that they're close to useless - and we just don't use them and just can't recommend you do. Have iCloud deal with deletions or forwarding or out-of-office auto replies. If you're using an Apple email account then everything goes through iCloud before it gets to your devices so maybe you could set up rules there. You'd just still see them all on your iPhone before Mail could do anything for you. So since Apple Mail tries to push emails to all of your devices at the same time, you could set up rules on your Mac to delete or forward some. It's this: Apple Mail has truly excellent tools on the Mac for helping you automatically deal with your email - but they are only on your Mac. ![]()
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