Use sounds to distinguish new messages in Mail
Oct 01, '02 08:42:39AM
Contributed by: Steff-X
This may be common knowledge but I think it is worth being submitted here.
I subscribed to several mailing list and I get many emails every day, most of them being automatically transfered to the corresponding mailbox, but I wanted to be specifically warned for incoming personal email. Here is how to make Mail.app (in Jaguar) play a different sound for your different email accounts and/or to play a sound only for emails that are not automatically transfered to another mailbox.
Say you have two different email accounts (personal@mac.com and work@mac.com) and that you subscribed to a mailing list (myMailingList).
- In the Preferences of Mail.app, set "New mail sound" to None (otherwise, you'll get several sounds played)
- Say you already have a rule to automatically transfer emails from the mailing list to a mailbox called "MailingMails". The rule is something like "If Subject contains [myMailingList], perform Transfer message to mailbox MailingMails (it depends on how the mailing server formats the Subject header. Adapt this rule to your own header structure)
- Click on the Plus button in "Perfom the following actions" section and select "Play sound" and the sound you want to be played, most likely a quite discrete one. Validate the changes.
- Create a new rule which will serve as a default rule.
- Set the new rule to "If To contains personal@mac.com, perform Play sound" and select the sound you wish.
- Repeat steps 4-5 to create another rule for your work@mac.com email address ans set another sound if you wish.
- In the Rules list, you must reorganise the order of the rules so that your mailing list emails will be transfered from inbox before the default rules apply.
That's it! Now your mailing list emails will be transfered first with the sound you attached to that action. For all the remaining messages, the default rules will apply and play the sounds you've selected for your different email addresses. Hope you'll find it useful.
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