Make Mail badge report only personal emails

Apr 10, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: radek

The Mail application can report the number of unread e-mails via a badge on the application’s Dock icon. It would be more useful if the badge showed more relevant personal e-mails (sent to you personally and not to a mailing list, ord sent from somebody you know). This way the user is interrupted less often, while still keeping track of relevant emails. Recently, Gmail has offered a way to prioritize emails (Gmail > Settings > Personal level indicators). The good news is that a similar technique can be used in Mail.

To have the personal emails reported, first create a “Personal email” rule. To create a rule in Mail, choose Mail > Preferences > Rules, then click on "Add rule." Name the rule “Personal email” and select the following:

Next, create a smart mailbox called “Relevant emails” that communicates with the rule defined above by looking at flagged emails. You can create a smart mailbox by choosing Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. Specify that e-mails in the smart mailbox should satisfy all of the following conditions: Finally, go to Mail's General preferences, and next to “Dock unread count” choose the “Relevant emails” smart mailbox.

The dock badge will now count unread personal e-mails from the smart mailbox you just created.

[kirkmc adds: I have actually done something similar for years. I have a "Current" smart mailbox, which contains messages that are important; everything but mailing lists, Google alerts and spam. That is the one I have selected for the Mail icon badge.

We ran a hint about this in 2009, but it simply specified how to choose a smart mailbox for the badge count. This current hint is useful as it explains how to filter specific e-mails that come from people you know.]

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