What is Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail, features and how to use Smart Mailbox?
Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail
‘Mail’ is the most popular email client for Mac that comes pre-installed. And therefore, it is most used client and in spite many other alternative, it still stands as the most preferred.
This status is achieved most likely by three factors – friendly interface, default client on Mac (pre-installed), and by great features. One of those features is the ability for custom-creating smart mailbox. It is not well-known but can be a great tool to view your messages if you use multiple mailboxes.
What is Smart Mailbox?
‘Smart Mailbox‘ displays your messages from all other mailboxes. But the nice thing about this feature is that it doesn’t merely combine the mailboxes but lets you specify the criteria to include specific messages.
For example, you can specify from which sender do you want the emails in your smart mailbox by simply adding the senders’ email address. It largely works like the filtering option where you specify filters, but it also keeps all those emails inside one particular mailbox. And unlike filters, it works with all mailboxes together and applies the rules you set to all the mailboxes.
Here’s how to use the features of Smart Mailbox in Apple Mail:
- To create a smart mailbox: Click on ‘Mailbox‘, then choose ‘New Smart Mailbox‘.
- Give Name and choose the criteria for the smart mailbox inside the pop-menus and text-fields.
- This will appear on the Mail Sidebar after you have at least one smart mailbox.
Note that this feature is just a local property of the mail client. It doesn’t appear with other email clients or program even after syncing. However, if you use iCloud drive, you can view your smart mailboxes in other Mac computers that iCloud drive turned on.
Few more tips:
- Today’ is a by-default Smart Mailbox that contains all emails from the current date fro all regular mailboxes.
- You can also create a copy of your Smart Mailbox
- To edit or delete them, Go to Mailbox sidebar, select the Smart Mailbox –> Edit or Delete
- Any changes made to the emails inside Smart Mailboxes also reflect in the main mailbox (such as read/unread, moving, deleting, etc.)
In Summary, it’s a nice, convenient feature that lets you see only those messages that you want inside a single mailbox. And the flexibility to set the rules/criteria is intuitive and flexible.