Smart mailboxes (and spam)

[Dave2002]

I have discovered Smart Mailboxes in Mac OS X, and I wonder if there is anything similar in Windows.

My use of smart mailboxes is changing. With a bit of configuration they could be very useful.

Assume that most people have Family, Friends, Work, Organisations, Clubs - where Organisations and Clubs might be groups one gets email from regularly, or occasionally.

My latest approach is as follows.

For each person - create their own individual smart mailbox. Obviously some justification needs to be given. If you have over 200 people in your family you don't want to create 200 mailboxes, but if there are only a few people who send you email, then include them.

Then define a new Smart Mailbox which is called FAMILY - with the rules:
ANY
Message is in Mailbox Person 1
Message is in Mailbox Person 2
Message is in Mailbox Person 3
etc.

Do the same for friends, and define a Smart Mailbox called FRIENDS with the rules:
ANY
Message is in Mailbox Friend 1
Message is in Mailbox Friend 2
Message is in Mailbox Friend 3
etc.

Repeat this for other groups where there are a modest number of people in each group. It is manageable.

Now if you want to find the most recent emails from anyone you want to hear from you can define two SMs - the first SM called WANTED

WANTED
ANY
Message is in Mailbox FAMILY
Message is in Mailbox FRIENDS
Message is in Mailbox CLUBS
Message is in Mailbox WORK
Message is in Mailbox ORGANISATIONS

THEN define RECENT WANTED as

RECENT WANTED ALL
Message is in Mailbox WANTED
Date Received is in the last week

That way by looking in the WANTED or RECENT WANTED mailboxes one can filter out the messages which one doesn't normally want to have. Obviously you can choose any period for the recent messages.

One can also define UNWANTED as
Message is not in Mailbox WANTED

Testing is required to make sure that any really wanted messages do not end up in the UNWANTED smart mailbox, and some editing will be required.

What should emerge is a mailbox where one can check all the most urgent and wanted email quickly. The UNWANTED smart mailbox can be scanned, and spam etc. can be deleted much more quickly.

What I don't know is if this approach works across all machines. Currently I have it running on my MBP laptop, and it would be useful to have the smart mailboxes available on the other Macs. Since I generally eschew clouds I haven't checked to see if it would work for cloud based mail systems, or would synchronise across other devices.

Note also that altough Apple claim to have smart mailboxes on iOS they are not the same as in Mac Mail and not (as far as I can see) usefully configurable by end users in the same way.

One other thing - some of the smart mailboxes I've set up on my MBP probably cause a lot of processing, and cause it to run hot, so I don't use them much. This is probably because they set up virtual intermediate mailboxes with thousands of messages. Most of the wanted mailboxes don't do that, but since most of the mail is swamped by other messages any smart mailbox which relies on evaluation using any smart mailbox which contains "unwanted" mail may cause cpu problems. That is a bit technical - but don't worry about it!

[Anastasius]

I tend to use Rules and move mail to dedicated folders.

[Dave2002]

I tend to use Rules and move mail to dedicated folders.

The Smart Mailboxes can be used to identify messages. There's nothing to stop the messages then being moved to dedicated folders later from the SMs.

I've not explored the Smart Mailbox Folder option yet - to see what that does. So far the approach I've described is working really well for me, as I was getting very bogged down trying to find files embedded in emails.

If necessary, given the SMs already set up, I can also make new selections by combining what I've already set up. I have, however already mentioned the lack of Boolean commands, and trying to make up conditions using the in built conditions without NOT,AND, OR or NOR or NAND is a pain. Many things can still be done, but some would be easier with conventional Boolean operators. Using variants of NOR or NAND in order to get round a lack of bracketing (Reverse Polish) is also a pain - looking for equivalent expressions is sometimes quite tricky.

I'm still wondering if Windows has anything as powerful - out of curiosity of course.

[Anastasius]

Can't really comment one way or another as I don't know what exactly you are trying to achieve. When you say 'files embedded in emails', do you mean attachments ?

Also why would you bother with Smart Mailboxes and then having to do the work yourself to move the mails into a folder when a Rule will automatically do it for you?

Rules are also Boolean.
You do always seem to find the most complicated way of doing things, old chap.

[Frances_iom]

Eudora did this 20+ years ago - Thunderbird has had filters etc for just about the same - or am I missing the special Apple sauce ?

[Dave2002]

Eudora did this 20+ years ago - Thunderbird has had filters etc for just about the same - or am I missing the special Apple sauce ?

I'm sure other systems also have had filters. As anastasius has pointed out, Rules are similar, and the interface on Apple kit looks similar, but the rule conditions are different.

One difference, IMO, is that the Smart Mailboxes leave the original mail boxes intact - or at least appear to. This means that there won't be any (major?) changes on mailboxes on servers. In this respect there is some similarity with the functional programming approach. Actually there are caveats here - I noted that there won't be any "major" changes on the servers. One filter condition which can be used is to check if messages are unread. Up to the point where the messages are identified, possibly there is no change on the server, but if all the messages are then examined, using the same filter again returns an empty result. Which is, of course, what one would expect.

With Rules I think one has to set up mailboxes either locally, or on the remote mail servers.

The other difference (I think this is the case - though there may be an equivalent in the Rule method) is that the conditions to check on whether messages are in particular smart mailboxes or not allows one to build up more complex filters.

Lastly, re the issue about Boolean operators, as far as I can see, neither smart mailboxes, nor rules, nor the search criteria within the Finder in Mac OS X, allow full Boolean expressions. AND corresponds to All, OR corresponds to Any. There is no explicit NOT. However, for some conditions there is an effective NOT (such as message is not in a mailbox) - but this is very dependent on what the condition is. An example would be a filter such as "all messages in the last 4 days", but there isn't a negated form of that.

Also, there is no bracketing, which effectively would mean that expressions would have to be done using something like Reverse Polish forms, and in the Boolean world, since there is no general NOT that means that some very odd expressions might have to be used.

I didn't realise that Thunderbird was still extant. I have used it previously, but at one point I found it couldn't do some specific task which I wanted, so reverted back to other mail systems. I think the filters in Thunderbird will most probably be similar to the rules possible within Apple Mail.

Technically I also think there might be a difference between the rule approach and the smart mailbox approach, as the smart mailboxes rely on the search features built into the OS. The rule approach might be able to and indeed might actually rely on searches elsewhere. However, it may also change the way data is stored, both locally and remotely if messages are moved into folders, which I think the smart mailbox approach avoids if used in the ways I have described.

Some users may want to actually move data into folders, and that should be possible using either rules or smart mailboxes..

[MrGongGong]

Erm
Just how many emails do you get every day?
You might be running the Virgin trains complaints department OR the George Lloyd society chatroom?

But if you do seem to be going about a rather huge amount of convoluted work to juggle a small number of messages.

[Dave2002]

Actually it's "only" taken me about an hour so far to set this up. I get hundreds of emails per day, and it sometimes takes me a long while to find some important ones. I think I'm already starting to win in terms of effectiveness.

[Anastasius]

Erm
Just how many emails do you get every day?
You might be running the Virgin trains complaints department OR the George Lloyd society chatroom?

But if you do seem to be going about a rather huge amount of convoluted work to juggle a small number of messages.

For once, Mr GG, I agree with you.

[MrGongGong]

Actually it's "only" taken me about an hour so far to set this up. I get hundreds of emails per day, and it sometimes takes me a long while to find some important ones. I think I'm already starting to win in terms of effectiveness.

Are you in West Africa by any chance ?
How many of them do you need to read ?