The Smart Mailboxes Disappeared on My MacBook
Among the applications that ship with Mac OS X, Apple's Mail provides support for viewing, creating, replying to and sending email messages. The program gives you several ways to sort and review your messages. Mail rules enable you to determine where Mail places your incoming messages as you receive them. Smart mailboxes let you sort your messages without moving them out of the folders into which you place them. Because smart mailboxes offer a conditional view of your correspondence, they can disappear without taking your email with them.
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Mail Rules
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Without a system of mail rules, you're left with a crowded inbox and no organizational principles to help you wade through its contents. If you receive large numbers of email messages, your mail quickly becomes unmanageable. Mail rules give you control over the filing system that Mail uses to sort your messages as you receive them and help you determine at a glance who's contacted you. For example, you can set up a folder for your clients and add an individual sub-folder for each one of them. As your mail rules sort your incoming messages, each one drops in the proper folder. When you look through the Clients folder, its highlighted folders show you who's been in touch.
Smart Mailboxes
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By contrast to mail rules, smart mailboxes exist only as long as you have messages that satisfy the criteria you establish for them. When you establish a smart mailbox, you can tell Mail to use it for all messages you sent in the last week, all messages you flagged for reply in your inbox or any set of criteria that provide a meaningful view of your email. Messages drop out of a smart mailbox because they no longer meet its criteria. Mail never actually moves these messages out of their filing place. It simply displays them to you in a virtual mailbox format.
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Deleting Messages
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If you use a smart mailbox to help you locate messages you want to delete, those messages move to your Mail Trash folder once you actually press the "Delete" key. That's not the end of them, as they remain in Mail Trash until you either empty it manually or it's emptied automatically because you shut down Mail. That's why it's important to remember that although the process of viewing a smart mailbox doesn't move your messages around, you can move messages out of a smart mailbox by deleting them.
Look Again
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If you're worried that you've accidentally misplaced or deleted messages while you were viewing them in a smart mailbox, look for your mail where your mail rules filed it, then check again in other folders to which you sometimes manually relocate messages. While you're looking, check the folders above and below the usual filing place for the messages you're trying to locate, to make sure you didn't accidentally bump a message with your pointing device and push it into an adjoining storage location.
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References
Resources
- Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual; David Pogue
