Create manual-activation-only Mail.app rules

Dec 15, '03 10:30:00AM

Contributed by: Kickaha

One feature from Eudora that I've sorely missed in Mail is the manual rules. These rules would never be applied to incoming mail, but only be triggered when the user selected mail manually, then asked for a rules application. These were very handy for sorting mail in the Inbox after the fact, particularly if the user didn't want incoming mail sorted before it was read.

I sort my mailing list messages into folders before reading, just to keep things manageable, but my work and private mail needs to be more obvious. Given that the Mail Dock icon does not indicate when mail has been received unless it stays in the Inbox, on-receipt filtering isn't optimal for me. Also, I have three different IMAP servers interacting for my mail receipt and storage ... if I have a flaky connection to one or more, auto-filtering gets messy.

After griping about this One More Time, I decided to find out once and for all if it were possible to find a workaround. It is.

Create a rule in Mail -> Preferences -> Rules, and set it up however you'd like, but add one criteria: Date Received greater than 0 days. Now, any mail that is received is by definition at 0 days, so this rule fails. But selecting your Inbox and triggering rules via Message -> Apply Rules results in the rule being triggered for all mail over a day old. Close to the old Eudora behaviour, at least.

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