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:
- The rule should match any of the following conditions
- "Sender is in my Previous Recipients"
- "Sender is in my Address Book"
- "Perform action": flag emails with a gray flag
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:
- E-mail should be unread ("Message is unread")
- Flagged ("Message is flagged")
- In your inbox ("Message is in Mailbox Inbox")
- Has been sent directly to you ("Any recipient contains myemail@mydomain").
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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