[X4U] Tiger Mail, SmartFolders or Rules?

[T. Patrick Henebry]

On May 1, 2005, at 11:00 AM, Michael Gmail wrote:

> On May 1, 2005, at 12:30 AM, Eric Prentice wrote:
>
>
>> In one sense, it seems like smart folders would be a better way to  
>> keep things clean and speed up the processing of incoming mail. On  
>> the flip side, it seems a little crazy to have all my mail sitting  
>> in one folder.
>>
>
> My half-baked thought--I'm scheduled for delivery of Tiger  
> tomorrow, so the only hands-on experience I've had have been a few  
> minutes at the Apple Store--is that it would make sense to maintain  
> a clear distinction between the *types* of criteria you want to use  
> with rules and with smart folders. I expect I'll continue filtering  
> communications with specific business associates to their own  
> "dumb" folders, and maybe use smart folders to pick out messages by  
> age, keywords, flagged status, whether they have attachments, or  
> the like.
>

I do something similar to this. I'm on a number of e-mail lists; and  
each list gets filtered into a "dumb" mailbox. But I have Smart  
Mailboxes set up to look for messages that meet specific criteria.

Here is another example. Create a group in Address book that contains  
the addresses of key coworkers, then crate a Smart Mailbox that shows  
unread e-mail from anyone in the group with the date of Today. That  
way you don't miss important e-mail; but your e-mail can still be  
filed to the appropriate "dumb" mailbox using rules.

The important thing to remember about Smart Mailboxes is this from  
the online help:

"Smart Mailboxes are mailboxes that display the results of a search.  
Messages in a Smart Mailbox are "virtual" messages—they don't  
actually exist in the Smart Mailbox itself. When you select a Smart  
Mailbox, you see a list of messages stored in other locations that  
match the search criteria you've provided. Smart Mailboxes  
automatically update the found list when new messages arrive that  
meet the search criteria.
You can create a Smart Mailbox that searches a single mailbox, a  
selected group of mailboxes, or all mailboxes."

--
T. Patrick Henebry
tphenebry at fuse.net