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How many times have you received an email and said to yourself, “I need to respond to this,” but the message gets lost among all the other messages in your inbox? It happens to me quite often. It’s great when we can respond right away with a very short message, but usually we need to do some research or think about our response, and within a few hours, some other issue has taken a priority.
Apple’s Mail program added smart folders in Mac OS X 10.5, and they can be a godsend. They’re just like smart playlists in iTunes: a smart folder contains messages that conform to rules you supply. But the messages aren’t moved to that folder; they’ll stay wherever they were originally and are only linked to the smart folder, just like an iTunes playlist.
Using a combination of flagging messages and a smart folder, we can create an easy way to track which messages need a reply from us. By using the following method, all you have to do, when reading an email, is press the flag button to flag it. Then, when you want see which messages are waiting for a reply, you can click on the “Needs Response” folder. Once a reply has been sent, the message will automatically get removed from the folder. With that in mind, let’s get to work.
Working with Mail
This walkthrough assumes you already have your mail account set up in Apple’s Mail.app. You’ll want to do that before you proceed.
- First, open Mail. From the Mailbox menu, select New Smart Mailbox…
- From here, a window will open for us to set up the smart mailbox. We’re going to do several things:
- Title the mailbox whatever you want. I chose “Needs Response.”
- The second line should read, “Contains messages that match all of the following conditions:”
- From the first pop-up list, select “Message is flagged.” Then, click the + button to add another line.
- From the second pop-up list, select “Message was not replied to.”
- Then click OK to make the folder.
- Now, at this point, we could technically be done. You could choose to mark a message as flagged from the Message menu, but I prefer to use a button or to type shift-command-L.
- To add the button, you want to right click (hold down the command key when clicking) in the space next to the “Get Mail” button and click “Customize Toolbar.” When the toolbar window pops up, drag the flag button somewhere onto the button bar:
Now, when a message is highlighted in your inbox, simply click the flag button, which will keep the message in your inbox but also add it to your new smart folder. Click the smart folder to view those messages awaiting responses. Once you reply to the messages, they’ll disappear from the smart folder.
There’s one caveat to this tip: if you don’t remember to flag the messages, they won’t show up in the smart mailbox. Clicking a button should be a lot easier than actually replying, but hey, that doesn’t mean we’ll always remember.
Did this tip work for you? Do you have another way to prevent messages from getting lost in the inbox? How do you stay on top of your mail? Let others know in the comments.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks so much for this tip. It solved one of my biggest problems. -Walt H
This is my first visit to your website. Thank you. I would have never known how to set up my ‘mail’ if I hadn’t read your post. Directions were great, but I did have a little hiccup finding the ‘customize toolbar’ which I found in the ‘View’ pull down menu. Setting up the Smart Mailbox will be very helpful. I will be visiting your lounge frequently and will inform others about your site. Happy New Year!