Apple Mail Tip: Unread Emails

[deirdre]

I’m sometimes horrible about marking some kinds of items as read or deleting them.

Things like:

1. People favoriting my tweets.
2. LiveJournal comment notifications.
3. Newsletters I don’t have time to read right away.
4. New product notices from my very favorite vendors.

Unfortunately, I sometimes skip important messages by mistake.

At the moment, I have (gulp) 182 of these kinds of unread messages.

I don’t like the default way Apple Mail handles unread messages, as I feel they get lost.

Here’s how to create a new smart mailbox that contains only your unread messages:

1. Mailbox menu -> New Smart Mailbox.
2. Name your smart mailbox. Mine is cleverly named: Unread.
3. Select “all” in the “Contains messages that match” popup.
4. It’ll be pre-filled with “Any recipient” and “contains” and hopefully your email address. Keep that, or fix it if it’s not that already.
5. Click the + sign on the right.
6. Select “Message is Unread” from the second pop-up row.
7. Click OK.

And you’re done.

Then you just need to go through and see if any of those things are things you can do without longer term.

Which is what I’m now doing.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.